The Canticle of Jack Kerouac

 If Kerouac were still with us he'd be 90 years old today. Here is Larry Ferlinghetti’s The Canticle of Jack Kerouac, pt. 2 (1987):

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

Via Ordinary finds