History Before Brunch Was Ever, Upon Finding 'dream Songs' Runover On 1st Avenue & East 10th - Redux Poem by Warren Falcon

History before brunch was ever in the world.
Sunday. St. Marks & 1st, doors open to sun &
saunter, the wander, now 'arm in arm they goes'
just past corner where was found Berryman
abandoned, run over, bleeding ink into the
avenue's black page, where I sit, a then-new
copy, heavy, Zukofsky's 'A' - already lost, me,
in the reading gladly, but torn Berryman on
my lap, sore, sad to see, so knee/kneel, rather,

read 'Z's 'A'

evoke old ward Italians, Jews, horse drawn
venders, runners about with carts heaving
vegetable griefs returned to church to synagogue
dark alley dead ends where what is left out
of grief is hard carved into bricks with knives

(O what is the name, lost perhaps, of
the old jew, he who once sharpened
all our knives?) :


THIS OUR LIFE
SOME FEW RETURN
TO HEAR/SEE


THE NATURE OF A CITY
IS TO CONTINUALLY
ERASE ITSELF


O framar of
the starry circle

'What wer, what be, what
shall bifall..how found knowe
Suche forme..wiche knowes not
shape? ... Some printed
lettars...But a passion..
sturs The myndz forse
while body liues, What light
the eyes..bite, Or sound
in ear...strike.' [from 'A']

STRIKE

'Zuke' counsels

Workers everywhere, bricks, straw, verse,

the breast naturally of Woman is bread before
there was bread, the child the loaf swelling in
Her arms to farm & from such frame a world.

Thus Labor. Bread is History.

Child's toil, unspoiled, forms a culture beast,
he crawls forth, makes bread of soil native &
other, a Mother culture all & still, everywhere.

- from 'Immigrants Exile - Labor, Drive Or Will, And The Lady Mother - A Malafiction'


**
photo: 2014. Out apartment window looking southwest on East 10th.
Early/barely spring out the window through the grate/escape one pear tree
once Peter Stuyvesant's grew 200 years old but gone now, once a placard
where it stood but not even that now, but hideous dormition of constructions
monstrous ugly.