1. The King, The Prince, The Poet

1. The King, The Prince, The Poet
for Michael McClure, October 20, 1932 – May 4, 2020

By Jack Foley

I
The prince is dead.
Defender of whales.
It didn’t seem possible.
The great one
Who read his work at
The most famous of all
San Francisco readings
Six Gallery, 1955.
The one who voiced his poems
To the marvelous melodies
Of Ray Manzarek,
From whom Janis Joplin
Stole a song,
The one who told me,
“People who wear black
Are in mourning for themselves.”
The king is dead.
The one who survived
Everything
And lived to sing of it,
The one who spoke
Chaucer in the original
So that people might know
Where our language came from.
The king, the prince, the poet
Who rose from Wichita
And embodied San Francisco
Who called to the birds near his home
Who answered.
“We were making,” he told me,
“The myth of ourselves.”
He survived so much
It seemed likely
That Death would make an exception
In his case
(No, he did not have Coronavirus!)
But this wonderful man
Is gone from us.
His Angel weeps.
Her name is Amy
And she will forever be
His love, his partner
Though there was another
Who loved him too.
Dear Angel, whose wings
Will have to fly in a different way
To find him now.
I loved them both
And learned from them.
She survives to build a world
Around herself in which
Michael forever is
And isn’t
While she goes on.
May she fly, as she always has,
With sweet, compassionate dignity.
May her delicate hands
Build figures (embodiments) that live forever
As Michael’s words
Will live forever.
There is a world
That does not die.
The Muses
Weep.

II

Elegy

The animals are clamoring
The deer
The hawks circling
The squirrels
All the inhabitants of the zoo
The lions in the San Francisco Zoo
They are all making noises
The monkeys howl
Dogs and cats in the streets
The incredible coyotes
Strolling in the city
The fish
The whales
Even the tiny things, the ants, the bugs, mosquitos
Everything
Even the living trees
That bend to the wind
Near the water
The ocean the sand
The monkeys
They are all muttering or crying
Or howling outright
And the animals that are people
The “mammal nation” —
All these creatures know
They clamor they “complain” (in the old sense)
That the poet McClure is gone
Though they cannot
tell you where

III

old poets
are not like
old soldiers:
we do not
fade away,
we die,
and more of us
daily.
yet words come
bidden, unbidden,
in every possible way
and the lust for freedom
not for ourselves alone
but for the community, for others
so that when the darkness comes
we can at least say
we did not welcome it
that we were never
“half in love with easeful death”
but always against it
always at odds
with whatever sought to limit life
though we knew we were nothing more
than leaves in a windstorm
pebbles on the shore
of a vast, unforgiving ocean
that brought us, with innumerable others,
into this rage called life.

Good travels to Michael McClure.