T HE C ENACLE / A PRIL - The ElectroLounge

T HE C ENACLE / JUNE 2001 /21
moment that you must acknowledge flailing joyful ignorance of the Beauty
before you.
Cement Park & The Cenacle are quite literally part of the same life-long project. Nothing else
in the magazine sets forth so plainly my views on Art & right conduct.
Another series of my stories in The Cenacle concerns the life & times of a man named
Nat Perfect who lives in present-day Boston. He’s in his 40s, wheelchair-bound (for
ambiguous reasons), runs a small newsstand in the Financial District, is romantically involved
with a woman named Kathleen Juliet Ripley. A snapshot of his character:
Lift a single, precious consciousness from the invisible film that covers all
creation. Just one is enough, much beyond enough. A crippled man, he, tho in
a way not as apparent as some may think. Some gentleness resides yet in
him. Love? Sure. Much of it. But he’s the stream not ready to drink, not yet of
purged of its poison. That time may finally come. Everyday that he drops his
body w/a grunt into that old wheelchair is another perhaps drawing him
closer to his first purestream day in a long time: Listen! Can you hear his
waters purifying themselves? Listen!
I enjoy writing his stories & many people like them, even prefer them to the wilder-eyed
much more experimental Cement Park fixtions.
My most significant poetic contribution to the early Cenacles was contained in Cenacle
#4-5 Summer 1995. I travelled across the country, by bus, by train, looking for poets &
artists everywhere with whom I might connect myself & my people. I had some luck, my eyes
wider-than-wide at all I saw, & ended up with a 100-poem sequence called Stranger America.
Cenacle #4-5 contained all the poems, about half as many photos, & many telling shards of
the places I‘d been & what I’d seen:
the night has surrounded me
on many paws and feet
on many towns, on the high plains
showing flat, luscious tummies
singing three-chord cosmic music
urging, pulling, loving memories
i’m still a star in Nebraska’s skies
i’m still a lonely drink on Division Street
i’m still an observer of Pacific’s bathing nudes
i’m still clung to Renoir’s waves