“I have so Little time to grieve” — Anne Waldman

by Andrei Codrescu

How do you care for the dead ?
Kaddish.  The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
And then year after year Dia de los Muertos.
All Saints’ Day in New Orleans.
My dead, you are watching, no ?
Hard cars, soft bodies, broken hearts.
Jeffrey and Glenn died when the VW hit a tree
on the Russian River village of Monte Rio
in California in 1977 before the internet.
In our dead lies the secret of greatness.
Jeffrey is a great poet still.  Ted Berrigan.
Jim Carroll.  The real marketing machine
of the cosmos is poetry.  The internet
is the shadow of an egret in the clear lake
of eternity, I mean music.
When Jeffrey died our common friend Hunce Voelcker
insisted on reading for forty days the Coleman translation
of the Tibetan Book of the Dead intro by Carl Jung
while I read the Chogyam Trungpa translation
simultaneously, choosing accuracy over beauty
in guiding the soul of our friend through the Bardo.
Coleman, Trungpa, said, got a color wrong, meaning
that the soul might wonder in the wrong direction
because of the mistranslation, reincarnating as a cockroach,
let’s say, instead of the non-Jeffrey he might have escaped in.
I would rather Jeffrey got through the Bardo and did not
reincarnate.
Hunce thought that being a cockroach is preferable to
nothingness.
Hunce also believed that, beauty is superior to accuracy.
He left his money to the American Poetry Academy for a poetry
prize.
Hunce loved Hart Crane but I liked the Scientific American.