HOUSEKEEPING

For goodness sake! Why do my archives just periodically vanish? They’ve been, again, restored and are filled with fine goods. If you happen to ever go looking for old mangos and find anything less than loads of them, drop me a line and I’ll go down to the basement and fix the creaky old archiver up. Sometimes, especially in the winter, it chuffs and wheezes and just gives out.

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HOW CROOKED WAS HE?

“He was so crooked he needed servants to help twist his pants on in the morning.”

Hunter S. Thompson on Richard Nixon. I think. I’m quoting from memory here.

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DALLAS, 1976, ALLEN GINSBERG

Okay, so it’s late fall 1999 and I’m in Dallas, at the Dallas Museum of Art, downtown, on a weekday. It’s spectacular, Dallas. The Stars and Stripes are flapping over Dealy Plaza, backlit by the strong and self-assured American sunshine. The Museum is spectacular too. Filled with heavy-hitting art stars’ canvases, and I am transfixed in front of something, I don’t remember what, and there’s almost nobody in there, because the place just opened for the day and it’s like Tuesday or Wednesday or something, but there is a group of American teenage girls in there, on a field trip, and they’re being led over, by their teacher or the museum lady, to a painting right next to the one at which I’m looking, and as they pass I smell the smell of American shampoo coming off of the thick heads of hair of healthy and still innocent American girls. And suddenly it’s mid-morning on a July day in 1976, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and I am eleven and standing in the driveway of my parents’ home before sex and before drugs and before money. It’s just getting hot and the garage door is open and in the shadows, up against the wall, I see the ping-pong table that’s always been there; that’s rarely used, and I am feeling a minor yearning that something so potentially fun is so completely ignored by the members of my family, who are all older than I am, and for whom the ping-pong table has be drained of novelty long ago. And there’s fresh super-ionized summer Calgary air blowing in off the Rocky Mountains past the University of Calgary and into my neighbourhood and right up my nose. The campus of the U of C is widely regarded as ugly, but to my eleven-year-old mind it seems to be the embodiment of everything that’s smart and clear and pure and still to come and on TV I had been watching Good Morning America and there’s a bicentennial in the USA and there’s something good about Philadelphia and BAM! I’m back in Dallas, in the museum, still with the clean scent of American teenage girl shampoo in my nose and my chest dizzyingly filled with that eleven-year-old Calgary day and I realize that that feeling, right there in my chest, is, and always was, Allen Ginsberg. Deceased American poet Allen Ginsberg. And then Allen Ginsberg is there, within me, fully revealed at last, and he’s talking briefly in that powerful but lilting voice of his, talking about the moment I’m having in the Dallas Museum of Art, and then it’s over. And I’m standing there, full of tears and vertigo, just me now again, and if the American teenage girls looked over they might have seen me physically shaking off the reverie as I pulled out my notebook to write down what Allen Ginsberg said.

So what I’m saying here is that I have a never-before seen poem written by Allen Ginsberg either two years after he died or in 1976. Well, I don’t actually know where it is, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have thrown that scrap of paper out.

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