Supernal

After hearing Anselm Hollo read his poems in Los Angeles, I walked up to him and said, "thank you, you don't know how much I needed that."

Joe Turner, the blues singer, lived on Budlong Ave. in south Central where I was privileged to know him near the end of his life. We'd sit in his backyard at a long wooden table, talking and drinking beer, watching his poodles play with a brightly colored beachball. Once I asked Joe if he had any children, he said, "none that I would claim." When I asked Joe's wife how he'd made a living during the hard times, she told me that all Joe could do was sing.

A good memory is a gift that pats you on the head to assure you you are really are in the world and that it's  a place worth being in. A dream is similar to a memory, but something else, a dream comes out of nowhere and makes up a story that you can either choose to make sense of or completely forget, depending on the size of your memory.

The last dream I remember involved a frozen owl who sang like a dove and couldn't fly. It was my job to teach the owl to sing properly, but I failed. We both fell to earth to die.

"How often do you dream of birds flying?" my friend Mike Meloan, who lives in Hollywood, asks.

"Not often enough, Mike, and much too often, if you know what I mean?"

The late Jean Burden insisted she always remembered flying dreams--they were special--while all other dreams vanished unless she wrote them down.

Dear Jean Burden, the first published poet who saw me as a poet! I'd sit in her workshop in Altadena every third Wednesday night, trying to live up to her vision.

Forty years later I can still hear Jean's voice, in memory and in dream. She's talking about all the things she didn't write, could never write, the things far, far away from her that she'd hoped to reach some day, how her life always seemed so ready to turn into something she'd never dreamed of becoming.