Driving the Rainbow Bridge While Listening to Jack Clarke & Charlie Keil

by John Roche

Driving West Virginia Turnpike
up from Black Mountain/Lake Eden tour (courtesy, Jeff Davis)
listening to JC reading, accompanied by CK
playing beaten string bass, hi hat cymbals, barrel drum, finger piano,
oriental gongs, rattles, and prerecorded
live in Buffalo, Nietzche’s 5/20/1984 & TheatreLoft, 3/13/1985
(Vox Audio, Bruce Holsapple, 2009)

Through Through Through
East River Tunnel, Into the Stone
along winding mountain roads
Gassaway Gassaway Gassaway all!
Birch River, The Return of Hecate
better than meeting sad silica ghosts of Gauley Bridge
Burnsville’ s burning bridge Bifrost
Mother Jones standing guard above Painted Creek Cabin Creek
Lost Creek, home of John Henry and the Dogon Nommos
Bridgeport, where I wave to Casey Jones

Tectonic notes shift
syntactic plates collide
wary that a word tsunami might sweep you over the unfigural
edge, The End of This Side, indeed!

But you go with it
and around it
and through it
all the way to Pleasant Valley and Fairmont

Resting in Pitts’ icy burg
seeking magic kernels

laetrile for the soul
cancer eating Gaia
God of the Gaps
Barsakh
Monk’s rests
Cage’s silences
Jack playing piano at post-Tralf party while Diz nods approvingly
Pollock’s atomic interstices
Wright’s space within to be lived in
Charlie’s primopraxial path bands
interval between acceleration and deceleration
mettle to the peddle
pause that reformats the world
The Rekindling of the Planet
Beginning the Other Side