At the Centre
Acid-induced vision, c.1970, by Thom Gunn
1 What place is this
What sky
2 What is this steady pouring that
What place is this
What am
3 Terror and beauty in a single board.
Later, downstairs and at the kitchen table,
LSD, Folsom Street |
NOTE
For generations the tallest tower in San Francisco's Mission-Soma border zone was Hamm's Brewery. On it, a scaffold held thousands of incandescent lights--pixels inches across--that animated words and images--a blue river, foam, golden beer. So big and splashy that even without psychedelic assistance I dreamed of it. A landmark, but just too costly to run and too hard to maintain--bulbs constantly blew. Torn down at last. So I was startled, amid Gunn's starkly realistic poems, to suddenly meet this ghost from my childhood (as snared by a better poet). I bent the rules and let this nondream in.
--Chris Wayan
SOURCE: Collected Poems by Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, 2007, pp. 48-49
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