Nathan Erwin
Acid for Two
for Clayton
We each take two tabs and a half,
and then another and the weeping
cherry trees bloom even though it’s winter,
and the snow blows under the memorial bench
where we read Vallejo in spring and talked
about drinking too much and ghost pipes
and chanterelles and what poetry even is—
the twist between nowness
and dreams. Page after page of disorder. There’s something
comforting about LSD and Larry Levis, similar really,
how they set down the world
piece by piece, then hand you the gasoline
and a butane torch. Out of the corner of my eye,
my dog appears, dusky and throbbing out of Vallejo’s Black Cup,
she springs through a membrane of wild honey
and runs down the street toward Black Jacks.
What am I called again? As you and I head downtown, the pollen
drifts outside of a bar, souls misplaced in bodies move in and out
of hidden phrases. A couple in the alleyway feels up the legs of the moon.
I can’t recall the title of this day . . . There is a bass drum in this poem,
a boy without a home, a concord grape vineyard, the story of Hendrix’s death,
me and you in the distance with overlapping auras. You say, I stole yours,
while you take small indigo sips of mine.
There’s a road and a bridge to an old cherry orchard. There are so many people,
milling in the street, milling about in love with ancestors clinging to their shirt sleeves,
unnoticed,
pleading, pleading to do it different this time. We are cresting the wave
as this poem becomes uninhabited. Where did you go?
Did I just share everything? Come back, come back.