beatific passenger and O, O, O Osiris, let us of our tawdry salesman cheapness be

  acquitted.62 For our cruelties thefts deceptions vanities deliver us not to constrictors critical and

  intestinal who digest remains of the remaindered, nor interrogate, by negative confession, eating

  cakes left for the dead or putting out of fires before their time.63 Freighted with crime the spirit

  sank on its Ulyssean avenue, homebound for Ithaca and Paul’s Penelope,64 and crossing Post

  thought of its ghost-house past Van Ness,65 where Brakhage saw with his own

  eyes, where Jess and Robert happy-coupled in their haunted ballroom66 while down Franklin some

  side-ordered Moriarty sweetheart hurdled throat-cut from a roof and into

  gravity when horseplay played out the wrong way, so many bop wraiths in the sway of Duncan’s

  coffin dance floor now.67 American the light, likewise American the dark shape cast, cut out from

  sweaters, old berets, and neath my generation’s yellowing penumbra I

  veered over Geary, barrelled past O’Farrell, next, with head on backwards looking to the path

  behind,68 my mourning barque bumped Market’s southmost bank, whence west I went to boneland.

  Crowded numinous were apparitions picketing the Palace, TV interference patterns

  crackling from 1963, Beat Amon holding his hand-lettered howl at Bloody Mama Nhu, Vietnam

  gestapo moll, and welching Lew with grifter grin joins in this first of many Southeast Asian

  interventions.69 Parasoled in private shade I made my way by the

  disfigured Federal Writers’ Project joint in where did Rexroth map our typewriter topography, a

  dusting of Depression deco on its fenestrated upper case but faceless otherwise,70 and had my

  hackles jackalled further down at 721, made monochrome, a flicker of intruding future

  mooching through a famed and faded fifties photograph where there below the Market Street

  marquee promising Tarzan Wild One Stranger Wore a Gun hunks Tootin’ Car-Man Cassady,

  his Franklin suicide-blonde cheek to cheek, and we have harboured such betrayals as I cannot

  speak.71 Now flailed and penitent progressed my pilgrimage a hundred

  numbers on to the Pacific Building where, back in the woe-beat gone, there stood the Brotherhood

  of Trailroad Rainmen from when On the Road jumped tracks to On the Rail and rode that

  lonesome whistle down the wildly worded line.72 Past 5th the psychic print of a Vic Tanny’s in

  tenebrous jockstrap steam, that motorbike Mike who nobody didn’t like whereat mclured

  musculatures into the limbs and language,73 so side-walking stylised on a sun-stained

  sidewalk up to 6th I stock-still stopped and saw American light blare like a delinquent radio

  straight down Golden Gate and blinded thus by avenue I thought again of bridge.

  Souls in suspension between blue and bay amidst a choral swell of wind in the soprano

  wire, their unendurable complexities resolved as plain ballistics, unpowered objects in

  trajectory and splash unheard above the Nile-wide waters. Ferrous tangerine are

  hanging loops of gartered stocking steel, unwritten lines running away into a boil of purpling

  vapour, off to next world Sausalito in the non-existent distance. There we tremble on an edge of

  balance and deliberation, scarcely light of heart or yet of feather

  heavy, fixed by our conclusion neither we nor world were real things at the last. Seeking in

  hopeless fog a clarity we take our single long step from fictitious history into the truth of

  empty air, and in our breast is all beat and all movement ceased, an end I please believe me

  never sought, a misjudged rhythm that I cannot now correct.74 Of this mind, then, and

  followed close by black bipedal dog, in self-wrought ankle chains I

  shuffled on, and up at 7th’s corner was arrested by the Greyhound Station’s unimaginable

  absence, ghostly orchestra of throaty engine, sighing brake, echoing voice against a

  roof celestially distant. Gasoline, piss, cigarettes, love in the

  washrooms and American light jemmying the eyelids of Old Angel Desolation

  fresh out of Seattle; winking in distractingly through dusty basement windows at shift

  workers weary from beatitude, poetry’s planetary pivot and deadeye Ed Dorn, slaves building

  tombs from baggage, like us all, and O to be again there, blameless in our unstained morning.75

  Dragging casket-leaded legs I, carrion, carried on to ford Van Ness, five o’clock

  fingerings of opaque damp down distant boulevards, grey and vermicular. Filmy in after-

  image stared a phantom Fillmore from forgetful murk, gratefully dead and crowned with

  album-cover crania; with the anthems of its sons.76 Desirous of a streetcar bier bearing this body

  west, this gold-leaf rot to rest, I boarded there the bump and rattle of my

  burial bed and from a left-side statue seat glanced off at lost Valencia as we crossed,

  stalking a wounded sun to its aortal gush on the horizon’s blade.77 Down there was where the

  wheelman’s wife was made to wait, winter of ’48, 109 Liberty but baby-bound until

  absconded dad drove home from Denver and beyond, with his besotted buddy Jack he

  picked up on the track in back, and thus that hard Beat road begins, and here its point of

  vanishing.78 Down that way also the book sepulchre graced once by one gregariously coarse and a

  bum-stumble dross of lesser drums, more muted beats, that shabby planet since

  abandoned.79 On a darkening incline slid my funerary chariot, caught in the burning solar

  barge’s wake, with each street passed some ritual stage McCoppin Pearl Guerrero of our mortal

  process into afterwards Duboce Dolores and at 16th I dismounted to the gathering

  crepuscule, American light some heroic punk who’s dying on a fire escape, gone from that high-up

  ledge where you just saw him, and as San Francisco Nuit bent to croquet-hoop under the misted

  stars, then came a buried thunder of the coffin-boat, and Sunset underground at Buena Vista Park.80

  Last-miling home to Caledonia as onyx settled on a blotter district drinking ink and doorways

  fat with black, American light blue in muzzle-flash, flypaper yellow in oncoming

  headlight, waded Pond and on the street where nothing prospered after all, made haunted

  halt.81 Here ends the road, here where the bridge was out, here where we

  broke off in mid-howl and pharaoh-hounds snapped bones for their jazz jelly. Here, our

  cardiac weight, the plundered scrolls now firelighters in a tumbled Alexandrian

  library.82 Night’s ashes in my hair I rolled this dung-ball soul past Sanchez, over Church in these

  skull-sugar territories and so came at last upon Our Lady of the Sorrows by her dried-tear creek,83

  shining albino through impenetrable wino dark. Here dreamed the dead, Miwok, Ohlone, hunting

  happy in the ground; Mexican governors or commandants; victims of

  vigilance and other martyrs, where we were the dream that clouded bone brows in their cobwebbed

  sleep.84 Here too, reviled was I, by Coghlan Catholics cast from that dolorous basilica, flinted

  hysterias stinging past my ears wherein that avian shrill rings still, respects rejected and

  atonement inadmissible, too late for truth’s jet plume.85 Conscience away at war, I

  soldiered past Guerrero and the Roxie where American light into Female Trouble or Eraserhead

  contorts, and all my thoughts were lilies shunned, evicted eulogies and Frankie Feathers

  ruffling at the grave.86 Returned home to find love and lights both out, in my dead bed I came to

  understand our names and days and dynasties as dust; our eras as contingencies of sand.

  1 This, a reference to Egyptian solar deity Atem, marks a departure in Belner’s work from his previous Buddhist stance, adopted after the spiritual beliefs of Belner’s literary idol, the poet Allen Ginsberg.

  2 An allusion to Belner’s partner, Paul Landesman, who sustained minor injuries when running into traffic on San Francisco’s James Lick Freeway, as described here, shortly before his committal to a psychiatric institution in September, 1971. There seems to be the implication that at this stage in the poem, Belner is identifying the titular American Light with Landesman. This reference to an abstract American phenomenon as a character in the text may also owe something to Beat writer Richard Brautigan’s novel Trout Fishing in America, although Belner was often openly dismissive of Brautigan’s writings, another opinion he may have picked up from his idol Ginsberg.

  3 ‘the dead flowers heaped past Masonic’ presumably refers to the Haight-Ashbury district, epicentre of the psychedelic movement and its attendant ‘flower children’ in the late 1960s, which, from a perspective of Belner’s home address in 1979 – when American Light was written – would be just west of Masonic Avenue. Though Belner appeared to court the so-called ‘Love Generation’ in its 1967 heyday, the lack of a reciprocal response is perhaps the reason for the somewhat dismissive reference to that ‘dead’ generation here.

  4 Although this phrase seems to refer to an early morning sexual encounter, probably with lover Paul Landesman, the word ‘Whorous’ is an obvious allusion to Egyptian sun-god Horus, while the phrase ends with a lower-case mention of Horus’s uncle, Set, god of storms and chaos. In one of the Egyptian mythological traditions, Horus is sodomised by Set, which may be the implication that Belner intended for these lines.

  5 Possibly a reference to Belner’s much-publicised cocaine addiction during the 1970s.

  6 This, clearly a sexual allusion, also references the Book of Coming Forth by Day, the original title of the text better known in the Western world as The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

  7 We note that by this second stanza, the American light now referred to would seem to be the light of fame and celebrity. The ‘fluttering, flattering’ moths, with their ‘white wings of onionskin’ would appear to be lesser writers, attracted by that celebrity, who leave onionskin copies of their manuscripts for Belner’s perusal. Such manuscripts are evidently the ‘glyphic corpses’ left by the author’s bedside lamp, and that he finds these bothersome is indicated by the description of nibbled holes in his ‘best patience’.

  8 Between 1973 and 1982, Belner lived at 15 Caledonia St, off 15th St between Valencia and Mission.

  9 Not for the last time, Belner demonstrates aversion to physically attractive writers of Irish descent. While we cannot say who is specifically referred to here, candidates might include the aforementioned Richard Brautigan; the justly celebrated Michael McClure; as-yet-unpublished Beat novelist Connor Davey; or the underappreciated Kirby Doyle. Nor is it clear whether Belner dislikes them for their genetic background or their good looks.

  10 This continues the poem’s Egyptian theme, the ancient Egyptians regarding the Western Lands as the kingdom of the dead, ruled over by the murdered-and-resurrected god Osiris.

  11 Referencing The Celtic Twilight as imagined by W. B. Yeats, this appears to announce a pejorative approach to the Irish that informs the poem’s next lines.

  12 The writer Connor Davey lived at 12 Prosper St, just off 16th and Market, with his girlfriend, between 1969 and Davey’s death in 1976. Davey may be the figure referred to as ‘O’Siris’, a comical combination of the poem’s Egyptian stylings and its anti-Irish insinuations. Strengthening this association, the mention of O’Siris being ‘long since gone to pieces’ could as easily be a callous reference to Davey having suffered a psychological breakdown just prior to his death, or a reference to the god Osiris, slain and cut into fourteen pieces by his brother, Set.

  13 This passage, ostensibly detailing how Belner compulsively followed a ‘bouquet of bruised roses’ – presumably a group of young gay men – towards the ‘studded’ leather bars of Folsom St, is suspicious only in that Belner’s pursuit terminates at Isis St, tiny and insignificant but the only street in the city to take its name from an Egyptian goddess.

  14 A not-inappropriate pun: at its bottom end, or ‘fundament’, the famously gay cruising strip of Polk St adjoins the far shorter Fell St, a place which at that time was as grim and dispiriting as its name suggests.

  15 In the mythology of Osiris, the god is murdered and cut into fourteen pieces by Set, who scatters his brother’s fragments throughout Egypt so that they could not be found and reassembled. However, the goddess Isis, being both the wife and sister of Osiris, searches the land and recovers thirteen of the dismembered god’s body parts, with only Osiris’s genitals remaining undiscovered. It thus seems safe to conclude that when Belner refers here to his ‘fourteenth piece’, he is talking about his apparently errant penis.

  16 Still in Egyptian mode, ‘the twelve hours of his seamy night’ references the Twelve Hours of the Night through which the sun barge of Osiris must pass after descending past the horizon into the underworld. The phrase possibly also nods to the structure of Belner’s poem, with its twelve stanzas marking the twelve hours of the poet’s day. The Foster’s Cafeteria mentioned once stood at 1200 Polk St, and it was here that Allen Ginsberg would gather for coffee and excited conversation in 1954 with the painter Robert LaVigne, Ginsberg’s future lover Peter Orlovsky, and poets Michael and Joanna McClure. Given that this branch of the since vanished cafeteria chain was situated near the corner of Sutter and Polk, many blocks up from Belner’s Market St vantage, we must suppose that the famously astigmatic poet was ‘sighting’ the premises in his mind’s eye only.

  17 This puns upon the name Restau or Re-Stau, land of the Egyptian gods, and the word restaurant.

  18 Amongst the animal-headed gods assembled in Belner’s cafeteria pantheon we should be unsurprised to find ‘Sunflower Sutra’ author Ginsberg, with Peter Orlovsky presumably supplying the ‘slender consort’.

  19 Here we find the always well-dressed Michael McClure conflated with Irish folk-hero Finn McCool.

  20 A reference to McClure’s continually raided and closed-down controversial play, The Beard.

  21 Interestingly, Belner seems reluctant to openly criticise McClure, who was, after all, a senior Beat figure and a friend of Ginsberg’s. Instead, he opts for the suggestion that the otherwise ‘quite estimable’ McClure was let down by the company he kept, namely his ‘would-BeBehan crew and wolf-eyed bride’. The former is almost certainly the same coterie of writers alluded to earlier, i.e. Brautigan, Doyle and Davey, while the ‘wolf-eyed bride’ is a dismissive reference to McClure’s wife, the fine poet Joanna McClure, whose first volume of poetry, published in 1974, was titled Wolf Eyes.

  22 At this stage in the poem’s development, Belner seems to be identifying the origins of the Beat movement as a source of American light, or at least suggesting it as an inspirational presence at those first get-togethers.

  23 The painter Robert LaVigne, an early and enduring friend of Allen Ginsberg, had rooms at the Hotel Wentley, which was directly upstairs from Foster’s Cafeteria.

  24 This refers to the Hotel Young on nearby Fern Street. If we assume that ‘sol’ is a continuation of Belner’s association of Allen Ginsberg with the sun-god Ra, as in line 39, then the Hotel Young is where Ginsberg lived during a melancholy and yearning break with boyfriend Peter Orlovsky.

  25 Ginsberg would later write that his stay at the Hotel Young had afforded him the privacy for an unrestrained sexual encounter with a visiting Neal Cassady, iconic Beat muse and Jack Kerouac’s driver for On the Road, who is without doubt the ‘burned-rubber angel’ that Belner alludes to here.

  26 After his time on the road with Kerouac and subsequent stint as driver of the bus ‘Furthur’ for Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, Neal Cassady finally died in February, 1968, after a solitary drug-fuelled overnight hike through the San Miguel de Allende region. His comatose body was discovered just feet from a railroad track.

  27 We note in passing that American light is now the mesmeric radiance cast by America’s film industry.

  28 If we ignore the unpleasantness of these lines, they appear to be a means of reinforcing the poem’s central ‘Twelve Hours of the Day’ conceit, as remarked upon in note 16, while at the same time bragging of Belner’s sexual prowess. Given that American Light has twelve stanzas, we are clearly meant to infer that the day described in the poem involved at least six sexual encounters. This may have been an invention or an exaggeration, but for anyone familiar with San Francisco’s gay scene during the pre-AIDS 1970s, it is not by any means an impossible tally, nor even a particularly unlikely one.

  29 Looking up Kearney St from Market St, Belner is here describing the Holiday Inn that has replaced the Hall of Justice where, in the closing months of 1957, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his business partner Shigeyoshi Murao of City Lights Books underwent their famous obscenity trial over the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. If the pair ‘gnawed their thumbnails’ it was not without just cause: as publishers, it was they who were facing the loss of their business, liberty or livelihoods, rather than the poem’s author. During the trial, Ginsberg himself was in Mexico hunting for the fabled hallucinogen yagé, or telepathine, claiming to have always known that the favourable outcome of the hearings was a foregone conclusion, although Ferlinghetti and Murao appear to have a somewhat different recollection of events.

  30 The Nam Yuen at 740 Washington was the favourite Chinatown eatery of poet, Zen scholar and environmentalist Gary Snyder. It was here that Snyder introduced Jack Kerouac to both Chinese cuisine and the use of chopsticks when the latter was newly arrived in San Francisco.

  31 This line is a bleak summary of Jack Kerouac’s later years. After the enormous success of On the Road seemed, at least to its author, to have reduced all later works to footnotes in the eyes of the literary public, Kerouac grew steadily more depressed and his drinking worsened. Moving back in with his co-dependent alcoholic mother, his conservativism and anti-communism became more pronounced, until his support for the conflict in Vietnam caused a rift with former Beat colleagues like Ginsberg who were fervently anti-war. Kerouac’s cruel disowning of his biological daughter Jan was also partly based upon his aversion to her ‘peacenik’ hippy tendencies. Kerouac eventually died in 1969, aged 47, hence the allusion here to funerary deity Anubis as ‘the black jackal man’, in keeping with American Light’s Egyptian imagery.