Rainy Gary Snyder Poetry Reading Night
For Albert and Jay
Gee,
a great beautiful poetry tower!
with lights and pictures coming from it
right in the middle
of the Fillmore Auditorium,
and Gary Snyder sitting on the stage floor
reading Mountains and Rivers without End
and the lights and pictures flashing
behind him on the wall.
He reads dramatically for almost two hours
the precise things of a man's life:
thousands of experiences speeded
up to no fucking around.
There is a candle burning beside him
and the Fillmore is filled with flowers
and oranges.
It is raining very hard outside.
Sometimes the sound of the rain
bumps up against the distant edges
of his voice.
After the reading friends stay
and majestically clean up the Fillmore.
There is the putting away of chairs
and sweeping of the floor.
Lew Welch goes out and gets a bottle
of vodka
and pours it into our coffee,
so now we're drinking
Russian coffee.
I walk home alone up Geary Street in the rain.
Water pours down the pillar
of a pedestrian overpass.
It looks like a small waterfall
and pleases me.
I feel relaxed and see a flat
dead pigeon forming a peninsula
in the rain-driven gutter.
The bird has been freshly run over
and its guts look like canned vegetables
but it doesn't bother me.
I end up here in my house on Geary
lying in bed with incense burning
on the dresser,
listening to the wet // slash of car tires
on the street,
and thinking about the poetry tower
with lights and pictures
coming from it.
San Francisco
March 16, 1967
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10.06.2026