The Canticle of Jack Kerouac
1.
Far from the sea far from the sea
of Breton fishermen
the white clouds scudding
over Lowell
and the white birches the
bare white birches
along the blear night roads
flashing by in darkness
(where once he rode
in Pop’s old Plymouth)
And the birch-white face
of a Merrimac madonna
shadowed in streetlight
by Merrimac’s shroudy waters
—a leaf blown
upon sea wind
out of Brittany
over endless oceans
2.
There is a garden in the memory of America
There is a nightbird in its memory
There is an andante cantabile
in a garden in the memory
of America
In a secret garden
in a private place
a song a melody
a nightsong echoing
in the memory of America
In the sound of a nightbird
outside a Lowell window
In the cry of kids
in tenement yards at night
In the deep sound
of a woman murmuring
a woman singing broken melody
in a shuttered room
in an old wood house
in Lowell
As the world cracks by
thundering
like a lost lumber truck
on a steep grade
in Kerouac America
The woman sits silent now
rocking backward
to Whistler’s Mother in Lowell
and all the tough old
Canuck mothers
and Jack’s Mémère
And they continue rocking
And may still on stormy nights show through
as a phantom after-image
on silent TV screens
a flickered after-image
that will not go away
in Moody Street
in Beaulieu Street
in ‘dirtstreet Sarah Avenue’
in Pawtucketville
And in the Church of St. Jean Baptiste
3.
And the Old Worthen Bar
in Lowell Mass. at midnight
in the now of Nineteen Eighty-seven
Kerouackian revellers
crowd the wood booths
ancient with carved initials
of a million drinking bouts
the clouts of the
Shrouded Stranger
upon each wood pew
where the likes of Kerouack lumberjack
feinted their defiance
of dung and death
Ah the broken wood and the punka fans still turning
(pull-cord wavings
of the breath of the Buddha)
still lost in Lowell’s
‘vast tragedies of darkness’
with Jack
4.
And the Four Sisters Diner
also known as ‘The Owl’
Sunday morning now
March Eighty-seven
or any year of Sunday specials
Scrambled eggs and chopped ham
the bright booths loaded with families
Lowell Greek and Gaspé French
Joual patois and Argos argot
Spartan slaves escaped
into the New World
here incarnate
in rush of blood of
American Sunday morning
And “Ti-Jean” Jack Kerouac
comes smiling in
baseball cap cocked up
hungry for mass
in this Church of All Hungry Saints
haunt of all-night Owls
blessing every booth ...
5.
Ah he the Silent Smiler
the one
with the lumberjack shirt
and cap with flaps askew
blowing his hands in winter
as if to light a flame
The Shrouded Stranger knew him
as Ti-Jean the Smiler
grooking past redbrick mill buildings
down by the riverrun
(O mighty Merrimac
‘thunderous husher’)
where once upon a midnight then
young Ti-Jean danced with Mémère
in the moondrowned light
And rolled upon the greensward
his mother and lover
all one with Buddha
in his arms
6.
And then Ti-Jean Jack with Joual tongue
disguised as an American fullback in plaid shirt
crossing and recrossing America
in speedy cars
a Dr. Sax’s shadow shadowing him
like a shroudy cloud over the landscape
Song of the Open Road sung drunken
with Whitman and Jack London and Thomas Wolfe
still echoing through
a Nineteen Thirties America
A Nineteen Forties America
an America now long gone
except in broken down dusty old
Greyhound Bus stations
in small lost towns
Ti-Jean’s vision of America
seen from a moving car window
the same as Wolfe’s lonely
sweeping vision
glimpsed from a coach-train long ago
(‘And thus did he see first the dark land’)
And so Jack
in an angel midnight bar
somewhere West of Middle America
where one drunk madonna
(shades of one on a Merrimac corner)
makes him a gesture with her eyes
a blue gesture
and Ti-Jean answers
only with his eyes
And the night goes on with them
And the light comes up on them
making love in a parking lot
7.
In the dark of his fellaheen night
in the light of the illuminated
Stations of the Cross
and the illuminated Grotto
down behind the Funeral Home
by roar of river
where now Ti-Jean alone
(returned to Lowell
in one more doomed
Wolfian attempt
to Go Home Again)
gropes past the Twelve Stations of the Cross
reciting aloud the French inscriptions
in his Joual accent
which makes the plaster French Christ
laugh and cry
as He hefts His huge Cross
up the Eternal Hill
And a very real tear drops
in the Grotto
from the face
of the stoned Virgin
8.
Light upon light
The Mountain
keeps still
9.
Hands over ears
He steals away
with the Bell. . . .
Writ in Lowell and Conway and Boston Mass. and San Francisco
March-April 1987
Copyright Credit: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “The Canticle of Jack Kerouac” from These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1993 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.
Source: These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993)