Wild Dreams Of A New Beginning by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight Beyond the ledges of concrete restaurants fall into dreams with candlelight couples Lost Alexandria still burns in a billion lightbulbs Lives cross lives idling at stoplights Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs 'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness' A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window A yogi speaks at Ojai 'It's all taking pace in one mind' On the lawn among the trees lovers are listening for the master to tell them they are one with the universe Eyes smell flowers and become them There's a deathless hush on the freeway tonight as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high sweeps in Los Angeles breathes its last gas and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska sinks with it The sea comes over in Utah Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere An orchestra onstage in Omaha keeps on playing Handel's Water Music Horns fill with water ans bass players float away on their instruments clutching them like lovers horizontal Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster Skyscrapers filled like water glasses Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine Great Books watered down in Evanston Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt Manhatten Island swept clean in sixteen seconds buried masts of Amsterdam arise as the great wave sweeps on Eastward to wash away over-age Camembert Europe manhatta steaming in sea-vines the washed land awakes again to wilderness the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets a cry of seabirds high over in empty eternity as the Hudson retakes its thickets and Indians reclaim their canoes