Staring into the mirror of Time, I watched him go. I wished for a copy of my Park poem to give him, but none was left; I decided to do up a second printing. For I knew the corner of Dwight where be ran from the guns the day they bulldozed the Park and his Tree. I was there too, maybe we ran together, there where Death touched my hand with the tiniest of reminders, and send me spinning for weeks into the Well to drag up the buckets of blood that clot into metaphor.

        A long poem is an albatross these days. I took it everywhere; no one would publish it. So I borrowed fifty bucks from my dad and printed it up myself -- went around to bookstores trying to get them to take it on consignment, gave it to friends, people who picked me up hitching, strangers on the street. I finally worked up enough nerve to read it in public in a few places -- but never in Berkeley.

        [Two years later, Todd Gitlin put it in his fine anthology of Movement poetry, Campfires of the Resistance (Bobbs-Merrill, 1971).]

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