After the world movie premiere Milk, October 28, 2008
we are ferried in buses to this great
rotunda of San Francisco City Hall
where just a few minutes ago we saw
the tormented image of Dan White
stalking Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk
to the music of Tosca
Gently intoxicated from two Camparis
and surrounded by a dark sea
of literally hundreds
of stolid gay men in business suits and ties
while still in my dirty old straw hat
I wore this afternoon in the Castro
to protect against any more basal skin cancers
I rise to what I might not dare if sober
and dance with a tiny clutch of beautiful women
one of whom I see the next day
from the front page photo in the Chronicle
is Sean Penn’s wife
and another in green whose mysterious
smile in the midst of her Bacchic abandon
engages me like Daphne’s whom I adored
(from very far off) when I was fifteen
All this happiness is let’s face it
just a huge ego trip
my fifteen minutes with the glitterati
the latest Mayor for the moment and the rich
who unlike Dan and myself have paid
a thousand bucks each for all this food
but the richest experience is this free-form dance
the dance where the ego full of itself
is lifted for moments in quiet joy
above its usual frontiers
that same inner force that directs poems
guiding my movements into something shared
a glimpse
of the erotic mystery
The world is one
At the Thai village by the kwan lake
during the Loy Krathong harvest water festival
I moshed with the crowds of beautiful teenagers
behind the big-rig tractors and their trailers
each ferrying the solemn retinue in white
of another district beauty queen
to the blare of hard rock and generators
the heavens filling slowly
with a trail of white hot-air lanterns khom fai
lifting from where we are towards the sky
halting baskets at first then planetlike
I danced with those teenagers
their parents and grandparents
bottles of naam kaao passed around rice liquor
brazen mothers thrusting their shy daughters
towards this unavailable old farang westerner
to the disgust of my good friend Pak
who as a Buddhist doesn’t even drink
especially since her brother’s death on a motorbike
but the monks were pressed three deep
on the deck of the village temple tower and smiling
with what I imagine could be empathic joy mudita
they too were part of that festival
while tonight outside the Castro Theatre
on the opposite side of the barricaded street
the chilled crowds waited to watch us leave
and waved their placards No on Eight Anti-Gay Marriage Proposition.
With Peter Coyote the Buddhist movie star
I chat about Gary Snyder in Kitkitdizze
off the grid in the high Sierra
having chosen as a rule to live outside
this great whirlpool of entropy
like Thomas Merton in Gethsemani
mindful as we all should be
how those who push wanton wars get reelected
and killing a gay man may get you five years
and I shock Dan Ellsberg on the shuttle bus
You (like Harvey Milk) are a man of faith!
Without assurances from a higher power
or White’s frozen incrustations of belief
you have risked your life
having glimpsed what others before you glimpsed --
seekers like Lennon no less than King and Gandhi --
a better life a novus ordo
seclorum for which there is (not counting
the wad of folded mottos in our wallets)
so little evidence
and yet when I dance with strangers --
arm draped for a lingering instant
over warm green shoulders which in another instant
I’ll never see again --
there is this inexplicable plus
my self well-nourished becomes more generous
I am lifted by this sense of being grateful
to you San Francisco city on seven hills
of gays, rednecks, Marxists, Catholics
where it is ordered we should love our neighbor
and forgive their trespasses
and to you, James! prestidigital Prospero!
who made all these imaginations happen
in the midst of our aporetic rough world
we are in not of
but born to enjoy
as we awaken very slowly
to what we cannot know
October 29, 2008
