With love and honor to one hip traveler of poetry, music, and the greater and inner worlds. Brant Lyon 1956-2012
AN ELEGY - for Brant
You who had eyes for all the jazzed out improv poets in New York City & tangoed in the rain singing your unmeasured song of lyric recovery --
Fellow traveler wading the Irawaddy River waist deep in the indigenous zone
Defier of gravity foe to every possessive pronoun in the book -- his hers yours theirs mine mine mine mine
Tousle headed All-American boy caught in the web of every literary café from here to Istanbul
Like a sailboat up a Bedouin tree waiting for the sea to rise or the breeze to come
Your magical hands twirling a cocktail glass
Your magical hands a Tibetan prayer wheel
Coptic crusader, wrangler tossing it with the Medusa or gazing simple as spit into the one- eyed radical desert sun
You were a Jersey cat, sure -- so what?
Snake bit at a tender age cut adrift you made the scene in your dive bar tuxedo -- danced the straw bear hugged the beast
O you who could not circumnavigate the pyramids on a bicycle and would not fiddle for a fool
O good looking Sphinx without porfolio a pair of serviceable wings on your back
Here! Here! wind for you sails! Here, thy steady rudder!
Brant Lyon, not gone, just looking for a little legroom in the stars: look home look
Home -- tell us how things appear, from up there, wherever it is you fly.