In the UN Diplomatic Bar
 	that looked down on a seamy waterfront		
      I was introduced to the elegant

Mrs. Norman Holmes Pearson
   	known for turning up with young male poets
      in this case Tambimuttu famous

for having published in Poetry London	
   	poets like Durrell Gascoyne
      and my parents’ friend Betty Smart

	whose book-length lament 
     	 on her scandalous betrayal 
      by the married poet George Barker

and their subsequent arrest in Arizona	        
  	 was bought up by her social-minded mother 
      back in Ottawa and then burned

I shared reminiscences with Tambi 
   	of fabled London pubs like the Fitzroy                
      where someone pointed out that Sylvia Bitch 

and a ponce assured me that a Mousehole weekend    
   	had once been proffered him by Eliot            
        or my night with the Roberts -- MacBryde and Colquhoun --
    
who went on when really drunk to trash the flat
   	of my harmless writer friend Chris Wanklyn
       remembered today because he made it into

The Letters of William S. Burroughs 	    
   	And precisely because I was so well suited 
      for life now in the Diplomatic Lounge

I who’d earlier turned down the chance
   	to sit at Pound’s feet with S at St. Elizabeths   			
      was caught up once again	       

like Dante’s Ulysses in that ancient urge
   	to seek experience where we don’t belong		  Inf 26:116
      and entreated Tambi to be my guide		              cf. Inf 1.130

back into that tavern underworld 
   	peopled with dropouts from the Unreal City
      with its tall skyscrapers of tinted glass

the White Horse in those days
   	so crowded with those remembering
      Dylan’s death just three years before

we preferred a small bar across the street
   	perhaps the one to which Caitlin fled		    Caitlin Thomas
      when pissed off at Dylan once again 

after the two of them -- in their furor		
   	poeticus – broke objets d’art and		             cf. Plato Ion 533d
      overturned tables at a party in their honor          Brinnin Dylan 146

as if to cry out to a stricken world
	 as once our prophets did Not this	 
      Assuredly not this	
										
Tambi and I were just witnesses		       
   	in this narrow bar where anything could happen 
      when one night we watched four thugs

burst in as a team to beat up their target
   	a bespectacled slightly sweaty man
      kicking him mercilessly on the floor

until they drove off
   	Tambi and I picked him up
      I carefully restored to his bruised face

his gold-rimmed glasses
  	 then suddenly the toughs were back
      to beat and kick him again still harder

this time his glasses into his face
   	till there was – as I recall -- much blood
      what happened next now completely forgotten 

above all the overwhelming question 
   	was he, as we first thought, now blind?
      a fact far too important to be remembered 

swept up in this wind of useless memories 
   	Kasper burning S’s books by Freud 		     Marsh John Kasper 7
      so infected by Pound’s rant about the Jews

he would soon get himself arrested	       
 	as he became a major suspect 
      in a string of Southern synagogue bombings --        

what is this this paradox that compels
   	me to disgorge these conflicted memories         
      and yet withhold S’s published name?

and what is this deficit in our daily life
   	that has driven us since Homer to seek truth
      from the darkness of the underworld? 	             Odyssey 10:539, 11:96
							
the Quebec tavern men’s room wall
   	where I had scribbled Daryl is a poet!
      inspiring beneath it Is she? Well fuck a snake!		

or those first all-night bouts on the waterfront
   	in Montreal with veterans from the war
      who drank as if there was nothing now to learn

or all the useless foreign ships locked
  	 in the winter ice of the Lachine Canal
       seen by a boy at the top of Westmount Mountain

all now gone