Philip Whalen

 

Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch before a poetry reading at Longshoreman’s Hall. | Photograph by Jim Hatch

A big part of this page (a big part of my head)
Is missing. That cabin where I expected to sit in the
Woods and write a novel got sold
out from under my imagination

I had it all figured out
in the green filter of a vine-maple shade
The itinerant grocer would arrive every week
There was no doubt in my mind that I’d have money
To trade for cabbages and bread

Where did that vision take place-maybe Arizona
Or New Mexico, where trees are much appreciated-

I looked forward to having many of my own
possessed them in a nonexistent future green world of lovely prose
Lost them in actual present poems in Berkeley
All changed, all strange, all new; none green.

 Tassajara, 17:iii78