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glory
                                                        preferably
    sitting on their horses.
                                There is a bright 86°
    for today. The sun is coming up orange. I have always
    believed you want
    to kill me with your stupid ideas
    about Canadianism, but relax, I don’t hate you for it.
    I am healthy despite these attacks,
    talented, & stronger than 2 average people.
                                                             I don’t
    hate you for it; I just think we should bring
    our horses down to swim in the Lake. It’s warm
    this morning, & I regard you & the cicadas
    with a bemused & moody eye.

WARHOL
    for Kathy Melanson
    We think of Time generally as being abstract, although Time is the condition in which these cultural periods happen, which is funny, don’t you think, because we say that Wittgenstein and Heisenberg are abstract, whereas they’re actually very tangible; and then we’ve got De Kooning, who is senile now (Warhol copied him, well, he tried to copy his face, he couldn’t very well copy his memories, Dutch, Amsterdam, hetero, adolescent lusts for French schoolgirls, the importance of Hans Hoffman, anti-Nazi, the
sturm
troopers in Berlin squares, where Alban Berg used to walk, trying to destroy the German people whom they said they loved, when, in reality, the reality of real time, they were nothing but a National Rifle Association in power; how could Warhol even copy his face, that gorgeous thick-browed innocence & those eyes), well, he’s senile now & there’s going to be a lot of litigation over the paintings. And of course De Kooning, being senile, doesn’t know … well, what doesn’t he know? Imagine if we could take a sortie into De Kooning’s mind, sort of like taking a dune buggy into the desert, what sort of blue & rose & grey flowers we
might
discover.
    A girl sitting in the front row of an OAC class where I’m doing a workshop this afternoon. I ask her if she thinks Joan Baez is a great singer. She’s about 17, bright, high forehead, good eyes, attractive. She says, Joan Who? I say, Baez. Bi Ezz. She smiles, not defensively, let’s not attribute things, but with a sort of natural mechanical amusement, and shrugs, looking around, reflexively, to see if there is peer group support. There isn’t supportexactly, but a sort of curiosity. These kids, it should be pointed out, especially since we touched on events in Europe in the 1930s, listen to 1000s of groups in a given year, most of them trash, some of them outstanding. Then a boy at the back of the class, in a black motorcycle jacket, says, Yeah, she’s terrific, she’s really important. He has status. He knows a lot about The Smiths, and that Stephen Morrissey isn’t nearly as cool as he’s supposed to be. They all turn and look at Jod, that’s his nickname, and sort of nod. The attractive girl in the short-sleeved dark blue sweater sort of shrugs and slides down a bit in her seat. The class turns back to me with increased interest.
    Don’t you think it would be more interesting than our average boring, Here’s a new writer from Belgium, and he’s going to read to you from his new unpublished boring Belgian novel, to have an evening at Massey Hall, or Thomson (Thomson really needs to be liberated a bit, don’t you think) with De Kooning sitting on stage, white coveralls etc. against a background of his paintings and some large blow-ups of black holes & red dwarfs, and to have Baez in the middle of the stage singing that song O when the angels come out in the morning and blow their trumpets?

SOMETIMES MEN BURN WITH A CRAZY FEVER
               “Honey,” she says, “do you want to dance with me?”
    We are in
               the dark meadow outside the Mackenzie farm,
    there’s a clear yellow full moon & she’s standing
    with her hands on her