I fear the future will find my works repellent
If it finds them at all
The sickly confessional mode which I have renounced
Which I was renouncing while I practiced it
The desperate gesture of renunciation
And I have flaunted erudition like a rookie amateur
Unseemly in one of such great age and small erudition
And if an amateur is in some sense a lover
A song of love is no song of contentment
And yet I have enjoyed for there is no other word
I have found joy in these paltry improvisations
Even those that spring from dire discontent

I have been of my time and outside it
The culture of my time my culture
Has been the industrial product of media conglomerates
The assemblages of television networks
Record labels movie studios and the cavalcade of stars
But who can dislike James Brown
Who can disdain the soaring zither on late night TV
Behind The Third Man
Or a local broadcast of the Leipzig Gewandhaus

Dickinson and Whitman fractured poetry in English
But that was ancient history
What a relief during my lifetime
When their descendants the highbrowed modernists
Were themselves smashed to fragments
By saxophones a good beat and electric guitars

Who doesn’t love dangerous old New York
Son of Sam and the Chelsea Hotel
A new smell every half a block
The restaurant familiar or unfamiliar the fetid dumpster
And out in the provinces
Who doesn’t love the smell of orange groves
Steel mills and bakeries and pastures and refineries
And everywhere
A new sound every second
Delta blues Bird and Diz
Smokey and Aretha and Stevie

But when America is remembered
It will be for hatred and torture
Lynching and segregation and the peculiar institution
For devouring consumption
For obesity and the diseases that accompany obesity
For endless generation of garbage
For gases and particles that interrupt and trap the sunlight
And indestructible alien polymers
And novel pathogens
And fanaticism political and religious
Genocide and Manifest Destiny
And the deadly white light
And the hellish white heat
Of the nuclear nemesis
I could pray to God but there is no God
And maybe there will be a place in memory
For a shower of rain
For Gene Kelly twirling on a lamppost