The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Summer of Love

  • Twenty Love Poems: 12

    at sunset suddenly dawns on us
    we might toss our favorite images
    into moon river and lucky old sun
    is so lonesome he could cry

    peacocks strut round the curves
    of Sunset Strip up on iridescent
    displays of monolithic cardboard
    billboards crackling in summer

    1968 and I’m late to the summer
    of love on the Peace Truck radio
    from the beach cities up to your
    place in Los Feliz not to make

    love or blow a number and go see
    2001: A Space Odyssey at Pacific
    or to protest a war or hear Johnny
    Rivers at the Whiskey but to visit

    the Children’s Hospital on Sunset
    at sunset the shifts changing
    the night coming on like a drug
    a dire psychedelic experience

    but nothing expands in fact
    we shrink into a dim distant
    past when our own singularities
    merge to form a celestial duo

    of one we don’t know what
    happened before that nor
    what comes next we have
    one memory and each other

    shivering great balls of grief
    we drive up to the park
    walk around the observatory
    the city of wilderness below

    ostrich features of orange
    gold drift across the basin
    and I whisper I will turn
    stones into bread for you

  • Summer of Love

    Mid-June we sat out exposed to one another’s musical ups
    and downers, refusals, kissing eye dews until the moon
    falls down, waves turned around, and the air like steam
    foam swept in drafts up the beach and over the hot strand.

    We walk down 42nd to the water rolling papers, smoking,
    and you toss back a couple of star-crossed pills, peace
    a far-fetched potion. You look for signs. I read a few poor
    poems by Hanshan on ways of being beyond need and want,

    the beach our Cold Mountain. Make-ready teens for war
    learn early love is not free, our children’s prayers said
    on red plastic rosary yo-yo beads, putty explosives,
    headbands turned into tourniquets, floral wreaths

    into olive drab steel pots. It takes courage to work out
    the hackneyed stereotypes future fighters might come
    to know. What is written is artificial intelligence.
    We might still be surfing were we better swimmers.

    We would be one were we better lovers, more open to fall
    and quail, but Summer of Love, a stone wall
    around my heart built, inscribed with three names:
    Kevin Mulhern, Gary Grubbs, Robert Shea – mistaken.