The day the students were arrested,
“Here you,” she said, “answer the phone.
I have to go down the hall.
If a bail-bondsman calls, take the message.”
So he went to work for the FSM,
answering the phone, relaying messages, typing.
“The incarnation of a human soul
in a body, some particular feature,
can blot out the world.”
“That’s beautiful,” she said. “Who wrote it?”
“I did,” he said. She was moved.
That was the first time she went to bed with him.
But it didn’t seem to mean anything-
he was just one of her friends.
She had several: a social worker,
an oboe-player, an artist
who had painted her in the nude.
He said, “You’re La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”
She said, “What does that mean?”
It’s a poem, he told her, about a fairy
who takes up with a knight.
He dreams of other men she’s had;
they’ve come to warn him about her,
and he wakes alone on the cold hillside.
“I like poetry,” she said.
“I just don’t have the time for it.”
At night when a foghorn boomed
he imagined a troopship leaving
for Vietnam, men huddled on deck
for a last look at the shore
and the lights of the Bay Area.
He helped to organize a peace march.
The Hell’s Angels charged the line
with their motorcycles, breaking arms and legs.
He protested and was teargassed,
climbed a fence and was arrested.
Outside the precinct station,
in the streets, life was going on
as usual. . . storekeepers,
pedestrians . . . the green parrot
in its cage at the Pet Emporium.
He walked to Telegraph Avenue
and sat and had a beer.
There were some people he knew
at a table. . . friends of Marilyn.
They said, “Come and join us.”
Yes, he thought. I might as well.
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