Andrew K. Peterson
The Beginning
In memoriam Joanne Kyger
After a 2006 dream where Allen Ginsberg invites me to pick his set-list for a poetry reading in a medieval village barn. I choose a leather-bound volume called The Beginning. Awake, I discover Allen does not have a poem called The Beginning.
The Beginning is for what i always want to be
(no beginnings, and without reservation)
where it seems you’ve always been.
Tonight might not snow on the poor
whippoorwill singing just delineations
of emotion through bleak measure’s fair
night outside the repertory of bad science
fiction, my loneliest guilty pleasure.
how fear keep us in wonder apropos
democracy, cf. “do we really care about
the magna carta?” or the always dream of being
one of a billion breathing comets crashing
around the tropic scientific expedition,
we few’d be select not for expertise
but for kindness & ability to learn & teach
knowing the best “learn bring rest to others.”
chef, singer, poet-astronomer, fire-swallower,
a hip old scientist like Kyger in a lab coat
leads us daily to our study: soil effects on turtle
migration, kelp flow on otter populations,
sand in the eye on dispersals of methods.
slowly, what we learn from everybody: play
ukulele in unique ways—i mean modern ukulele—
identify each star song & bird fight to the solstice
gifts us from this, our daily pain,
take what we have from what we can continue
giving away, return to one another’s friends
i to yours, you to mine if you so choose
take me to where you belong,
readjust to this new life of infinite divisions and
love’s indivisibles. learn from what we can, leave
the rest behind in the greened-out seventies
before-the-giant squid-attacks-me-kind-of-fear,
not so much the fear of being dead, but the cost of
dying. with no locks, just respect the cucumbers
we call friends & find some ways of fuller living
inside the all ways dream where we do the daily waking
Andrew K. Peterson is the author of The Big Game Is Every Night (Locofo Chaps, 2017), Anonymous Bouquet (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015), and bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (Fact-Simile, 2011). His work appears in Emergency Index 2012 (Ugly Duckling Presse) and has been featured in museum exhibits and performance projects. He edits the online literary journal summer stock and lives in Boston.
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