75 This passage resurrects the Greyhound station that formerly stood at 7th and Market, mentioned in Desolation Angels as Jack Kerouac’s point of arrival in San Francisco after a journey from Seattle. Presumably, ‘poetry’s planetary pivot’ is another heliocentric nod to Allen Ginsberg, who, in 1956, worked in the Greyhound station’s baggage department when unable to find railroad work like Kerouac and Cassady. The wonderful Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn was working in the same department at the same time, but on a different shift.

  76 These lines seem to be recasting the Fillmore West at Van Ness and Market in an Egyptian light by alluding to the Egypt-referencing Grateful Dead, their Anthem of the Sun and their skull-festooned record jackets.

  77 Draped as it is in funerary flourishes and allusions to Tennessee Williams, we should infer that at this point Belner boarded San Francisco’s historic streetcar line, that would take him to the western end of 16th St.

  78 It was at Carolyn Cassady’s apartment at 109 Liberty, referred to here, that Carolyn – demoted here to ‘the wheelman’s wife’ – waited over the winter of 1948, with a newborn baby, for husband and father Neal to return from a trip to Denver and the East Coast. When he finally arrived home in early February, he had new-found friend Jack Kerouac with him, having just completed the epic cross-country drive that would become On the Road. In his suddenly melancholy mood, Belner seems to construe this area as the place where the Beat vision began and also, for reasons that are possibly clear only to the poet himself, where that vision finds its end.

  79 A reference here to the Abandoned Planet bookstore that once stood at 518 Valencia, a faintly shabby but much-loved and respected literary outlet that, amongst its clientele, may well have numbered Gregory Corso, as Belner maintains here, but was much better known as the hangout of the magnificent Jack Micheline. Eking out a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets, particularly in these later years, Micheline is an exemplary poet, painter, and early proponent of jazz–poetry who has performed with Charlie Mingus, and is regarded by many as one of the few genuinely authentic Beat figures, relegated to Belner’s ‘bum-stumble dross’ in this passage.

  80 More Egyptian window dressing: Nuit is the Egyptian goddess of the night sky, usually depicted as bending in an arch across the heavens. The reference to the Sunset rail line that runs under Buena Vista Park is refitted here to reflect the Egyptian concept that when the solar barge has completed its journey across the daytime skies, it must next commence its subterranean passage through the underworld and the Twelve Hours of the Night; literally a ‘Sunset underground’.

  81 If Belner’s day and poem are, respectively, twelve hours and twelve stanzas in length, then we can perhaps deduce that this Beat-encompassing walk took place around 16 March in 1979, when the sun would have risen at 6:18 a.m. and set at 6:18 p.m. The fact that Belner makes his ‘haunted halt’ on ‘the street where nothing prospered after all’ is seemingly a reference to Prosper St, which, as we have pointed out in note 12, was the residence of writer Connor Davey and his partner between 1969 and Davey’s death in 1976. This may be a good point at which to examine the Davey story in greater detail, given that the young author, unnamed, seems to be a hidden undercurrent that runs throughout Belner’s poem. Born 1941 in Chicago, Connor Davey arrived in San Francisco in the summer of 1964 as a good-looking young man in his early twenties, openly besotted with Beat literature and, in particular, the writings of Harmon Belner, whose poem Harlem Gold in 1959 had made a tremendous impression on the then teenage Davey. Davey, then living just off Filbert St in North Beach, soon became friends with Michael and Joanna McClure, and through them encountered many of the scene’s other luminaries, notably McClure’s friends Kirby Doyle and Richard Brautigan. It was during a late-night drinking session with this latter pair that Doyle had remarked on how terrible it would be to be a poet in ancient Sumer, having to carry clay tablets around to jot down inspirations on. This had evolved, by the conversation’s end, into the notion of a similarly burdened private eye in the ancient world, providing the seed idea for what would, almost a decade later, grow into Davey’s first book, Coming Forth by Day in America, and possibly inspire Richard Brautigan’s delightful 1977 novel, Dreaming of Babylon. Davey met Harmon Belner in 1966 at the sole performance of Michael McClure’s The Beard at the Committee Theater, as mentioned in notes 42 and 43. In 1969 Davey moved into his new girlfriend’s apartment on Prosper St, which happened to be just a few blocks from where Belner lived with Paul Landesman at 15 Caledonia St. In 1975, after typing the first draft of Coming Forth by Day in America, Davey loaned it to Belner, eager for his literary hero’s comments. When this commentary was unforthcoming and Davey at last plucked up the courage to ask the older writer if he had any thoughts on the manuscript, Belner at first claimed that he must have lost it, and then later questioned whether Davey had ever loaned him the work in the first instance. Believing the only copy of his life’s work to be thus disappeared, Davey grew increasingly distraught and angry, at one point confronting Belner after a chance meeting on Kearney St, the incident referred to in note 33. Finally, in a spiral of depression caused by the apparent loss of his work, unaware that the careful longhand notebooks containing his original draft had fallen inside his writing desk where they would later be found by his widowed partner, Davey took his own life by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge on 16 March 1976, which, strangely, would appear to be the date commemorated in Belner’s poem.

  82 If ‘the road’ at the start of this section is the same Kerouacian road that Belner claimed had begun at Carolyn Cassady’s apartment on Liberty, as per note 78, then Belner seems to feel that Prosper St is where the Beat dream reached its end point – or, perhaps more accurately, where Harmon Belner’s Beat dream was concluded. Similarly, if the phrase ‘where the bridge was out’ refers to Connor Davey’s suicide, as described above, then perhaps the young writer’s death is not unconnected with Belner’s sense of his personal Beat dream being extinguished here. The final line, with its ‘cardiac weight’ signifying Belner’s heavy heart, seems to refer to the burning of manuscripts at the Library at Alexandria that became emblematic of the commencement of the Dark Ages, unless of course Belner is referring to some other ‘plundered scrolls’ that may have ended up in flames.

  83 These lines refer to the Mission Dolores and the adjoining Mission Dolores Basilica on 16th St, with the original mission being San Francisco’s oldest surviving structure, originally named after a nearby creek, Arroyo de Nuestra Seńora de los Dolores, or ‘Our Lady of Sorrows Creek’.

  84 Interred at the mission are many prominent San Franciscans, including some thousands of the Native American Miwok and Ohlone people who helped construct the Mission Dolores; the first Mexican governor; the first commandant of the Presidio; victims of the Committee of Vigilance, and any ‘other martyrs’ Belner may be thinking of in these lines.

  85 Here, Belner somewhat disingenuously refers to the funeral of Connor Davey, held at the Mission Dolores Basilica on 11 April 1976. The reference to notoriously anti-Semitic Catholic broadcaster, Father Coghlan, seems to be an attempt to imply that Belner was excluded from Davey’s funeral – which he was – by virtue of Belner being Jewish, which was certainly not the case: when Belner arrived at the event uninvited, Davey’s widowed partner became volubly upset, loudly blamed Belner’s careless indifference for Davey’s suicide, and demanded that the poet be escorted from the basilica before the ceremony could proceed. Her condemnations possibly account for the ‘flinted hysterias’ and ‘avian shrill’ mentioned here.

  86 This apparently refers to the event described above. ‘Frankie Feathers’ is Connor Davey’s partner, who evicted Belner from Davey’s funeral and who went on to rediscover Davey’s lost book and prepare it for publication by Hillwood Press next year, Clara Frances ‘Frankie’ Bird.

  AND, AT THE LAST, JUST TO BE DONE WITH SILENCE

  ‘Does not this wind what’s in the branches make a noise of unkind laughter? Those are, anyway, my best thoughts on the matter. What say you, now?’

  ‘ ’

  ‘Come, put not such a sober face upon it. I’ll allow we are in a bad way of things, but at the least we have each other’s company and chatter, do we not? To be alone at our ordeal, I think, should be a misery past all enduring.’

  ‘ ’

  ‘Well, if that’s your mood, I shall not press you further, though it seems to me a pity. We two are the last men left out of our party who set forth from Brackley. Was that truly not yet fourteen days since? I have lost sense of time’s passage, but I would have thought it as more like to months.’

  ‘ ’

  ‘You are not to be turned from your decision, I can see it. You are in no mood to talk, it’s plain, though if for my part I speak out, I take it that you shall not have objection?’

  ‘ ’

  ‘That is more the spirit! We shall make a pleasant outing of this yet, we pair of old companions. When I think what we have seen together, I am fair made giddy. What a day that was, when we were met in Brackley at the old church. Five or six of us, as I recall it now, though many more came out to watch the hanging, as is only what you might expect. It was, I think, October then, with spectacle scarce otherwise in those parts. There was an old man, not in his right wits by the look of him, who cheered and clapped along with the excitement of it, and a small boy with a green snot going up and down beneath his nose as he breathed in and out, do you remember? Now I think, there was as well a dog what only had three legs, who barked and limped about the edges of the gathering. That was a time, all right. They shan’t forget the half a dozen of us in a hurry, I’ll be bound.’

  ‘Five. Five of us.’

  ‘What? What was that? I thought to hear a sound, above the tree limbs and their oaken mockery.’

  ‘ ’

  ‘Pray, fellow, take ye no offence. Come, speak again, that there should be a fellowship in our distress. What was it that you said just now? I could not make it out. I’m not in good health, if I tell the truth.’

  ‘Five. I said, there were five of us at Brackley church. Now, be quiet with your nonsense.’

  ‘Five, you say? Ah, then it may be so. Myself, I’m nearly mad from punishment, and trust neither my recollections nor my senses. Things are shimmering or singing, and I can’t tell which it is.’

  ‘Well, I’m no better, am I? All things have an air to them as if they might do ill at any instant, like milk not far from the boil. Of mud and puddle, gate and nettle bed, I grow dismayed, disliking something spiteful in their character. We are the both of us not far from death, is my belief.’

  ‘I am as sure of it as you. More sure, I dare to say. My thoughts are maggoted from woe. What of our comrades, who were with us at the start? There were then six of us, I thought you said.’

  ‘Five, blast you. There were five of us. I said it not a minute since. Five of us at the church. Roger of Hinckley, he was bailiff. It was him as said we should go in, and him who was the author of our troubles. If I had him here beside me now, why, I should set our burden down, and choke him dead.’

  ‘He is not one of us already fallen, then? There have been one or two done that, as I’m aware.’

  ‘No. If it were that way, I should not mind so much. When he heard what our sentence was to be, he was made paler as the lily. He said it should kill him, and went straight on the King’s Highway down to Dover, where he made for France. And yet, he were the one! He were the one who said we should go in and bring the rascal out. When I made protest, and said doing so should tempt God’s wrath, he cuffed me, saying that if I did not, then it would tempt the Earl of Leicester’s wrath the sooner.’

  ‘You are right. It was the going in the church that did for all of us. I can remember thinking, ‘it shall do me not a bit of good to come in here’, but went and did it anyway.’

  ‘Aye. Aye, we did, and there’s no coming back from it. So, if you do not mind, I’d—’

  ‘Ah, my memory is like a sieve that has big holes, where all my thoughts are small. So, when the bailiff Roger that you speak of had run off, there were then five of us, if I am understanding you.’

  ‘Yes. What? No. No, there were only the four of us once he had gone. There was myself – John Halpen – come from Banbury, and Will Tite from that place also. With us there was Rob of Bedford, and Martin from Peterborough, who I did not know as well. Might that be you yourself?’

  ‘Yes! Yes, it might! But, thinking of it, I have never been in Peterborough, and cannot remember if they called me Martin. I fear that my wits are, for the most of it, destroyed. Can you not have a look, then tell me who you think I seem like?’

  ‘Fat good would it do, with my eyes being how they are. All that I see is half enchanted, as if viewed through spiderwebs that make a pattern over everything. Its bulbs and beads are big and slow at the outsides, but littler and more frantic in the midst. This hard and frozen path we tread is to me everywhere with swirls and currents, as though it was sluggish waters. It is frightening in its prettiness, and I would as soon drop our load and run, were it not for the pair that ride always behind us. They’re still there, I’ll wager. Can you spot them from where you are?’

  ‘No. My eyes are all right, but I have a stiffness in my neck that will not let me turn my head. I hear them, though. They trot some way behind, as you suspect, and make complaint about the smell of us. But would I know more of these signs and wonders you behold. Are you a saint, do you suppose?’

  ‘I had not thought it so afore you said, but now I cannot tell. Are not the visions of the saints more full of lambs and angels? Mine has only ugly creatures snarling out of tree bark, and up from the ponds we pass teem glistening beasts like bladders, or like soft and slimy beetles, or the pimpled bone of crab claws but with many hateful eyes. These masses over us, that I know to be but the winter clouds, are in my gaze made to great, tangled balls of giant worm that hang as big as towns from the bare sky. They writhe continually in and out from squirming knots, blind bodies thick like turrets, in plump, parcelled lengths, pink-grey, that have wet light wiped down their sides. The colours that there are in things would make your scalp crawl, all the world more intricate than snails. I cannot think I am a saint, but have not otherwise a reason for this starry terror that there is in everything.’

  ‘I have heard say – though only by ungodly men – that when the saints would scourge themselves, with flails of leather what had not been cured, it would let plagues in where the skin was broke and that was why they saw the things they did. If that were so, then with you being flogged so many times by now, and with the pestilential weight you carry, I should say that in my sight you are as good a saint as any. It is my guess that the lambs and angels shall arrive in their due course.’

  ‘There may be much in what you say. I have not heard that tale before, or else it was forgot. It would make cruel sense of our sentence and its stipulations, were it so. Old Bishop Hugh said as we should be stripped down to our britches and then took to Brackley, all in irons, to dig up the man—’

  ‘This was the fellow that you dragged from out the church and hanged?’

  ‘Aye, that same man. We were to dig him up, then carry him on our bare shoulders all about the churches in the shire, there to be scourged at every one before we could with bloody backs and stinking lich proceed. If what you say is true, then Hugh of Lincoln did as good as put us all to death, but saw to it that we should first be madmen. It is not so much a wonder that Roger of Hinckley ran away to exile how he did, although as I have said, he were the one insisted we breach sanctuary.’

  ‘Ah, well, sanctuary. It’s a thing that God is said to be particular about, or so his ministers would have it. In the ordinary run of things, I’ve found it better that the church be not upset about a matter, as they more than often take it bad.’

  ‘That is made plain by our predicament. The church is over all, and not the Earl of Leicester nor his men shall come before it. Why, was not King Henry flogged himself, for murdering Tom Becket? It may be he was as well beset by visions, though they surely would be better ones than mine, to suit his standing. He would not have everywhere these turning wheels of skull, nor take the movement of the grass for landed birds all shivering in the chill. He should not see in each hill a despairing giant, sat for so long with its head between its knees that weed and bramble have grown up its spine. A king, I think, should see more of embroidery or lions, and as like to that.’