LAST WEEK, a long week filled with one thing and another, but mostly filled with the weight of death, the sudden death of my son's "Baja grandpa," Rebel Girl walked into the Humanities Center and saw a student reading Allen Ginsberg's Howl, the small black and white City Lights edition. She wasn't reading it, the student told me, because it was assigned. She was reading it because she always wanted to. She was deep into it too, past "Howl," past "Footnote for Howl," beyond "A Supermarket in California" and "Sunflower Sutra" and "America." And so, for that student and for my friend, dead now, heart attack underwater while doing what he did best and often: helping others, and for the rest of us, one of Allen Ginsberg's earlier poems from the back of the book, a sweet thing, maybe too sweet, but hey.
Song
The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human—
looks out of the heart
burning with purity—
for the burden of life
is love,
but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.
No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love—
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
—cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:
the weight is too heavy
—must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.
The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye—
yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.
