I’m sitting on my haunches, balancing
the weight of my body on the balls of my feet,
rocking a little in the nipping night air
out on the roof of a hostel on Broadway.
 
Below in the dorms the young are hatching plans,
hitching rides and getting hitched. They’ve worlds
to get to and a world to get away from. I guess
their youth will burn long enough for that.
 
Stretched out on his back by my side, James
Binnie from Toronto contemplates mortality.
Nights out on the mesas in Santa Fe, nights
by the waves in Santa Barbara; he’d been in the cold
 
long enough to feel the stars. Their pale fires
lodge now in his eyes. From my personal mountain
I acknowledge the purity of one who has lived
the questions and kept the faith of no name.
 
At twenty he wears the face of Christ
and seems to have been nailed many times;
doggedly shrugging off the shroud, he moves
like spring, his mind offering sprays of wild flowers.
 
When he speaks you feel the authority
of one who has come back from the dead.
He has come back for an undead such as me,
to spread the message, to heal the wound.
 
Before us San Francisco rises and falls,
the streets like breaths of the moonlit sea.
The strip-joints beckon like underwater caves, the cafes
and bars rustle with feminism, politics and lust.
 
Two blocks down the road City Lights has gone from beat
to bourgeois. The Cassadys and Dharma Bums
have long since gone off and down the road,
unhappily married or married to quiet now.
 
Reaching thirty I feel the downbeat too,
and fear to have taken a wrong turn somewhere.
James says if my choice were free, there’d be
further turnings, to let go or be let free.
 
I tell him of a woman who makes me cry,
how her violently fluctuating compass point
sets mine wavering, off the track, how we stand
lost in each other’s crossroads now.
 
In leaving both of you are on your way
to each other and what you are, the distance
in his eyes counsels. To know you are unfree
is the first step. All journeys begin with that.
 
James, what did you do in New Mexico,
what Indian medicine did you consume,
what water did you drink from the arroyos,
what fire you caught off the canyon walls?
 
Did you meet Zarathustra on Route 66
or thumb a ride from Neal Cassady? Or sit
out the night with the Bums? Years, I know now,
are not the gauge of our lives; the moments, not the miles
 
matter. Cynic that I am, I doubted first.
But touching your wound, the place you’ve travelled
from, turned me believer. With your gospel
I am ready to move into my desert now.
 
You stay out longer on the roof. I go
down to warm my hands over the fire of your words.
As I turn for a goodnight, I see the lonely truth
of your body under the San Francisco sky.
 
It is your night I feel, the struggle, the brief peace
between wars. I thank the young man in the dark room
of his desert, who will not let life rest,
whom life will not let rest.