I hitched from Iowa City out to Oakland
and spent the night with Darrel Gray,
a lonely poet, sensitive and kind,
and his poems were decent, too, but he drank himself
to death in 1985, and his landlord tossed
his papers and effects into the street.

Then I went on to Venice Beach to stay with Tom,
and Desmond Rogers came and chanted poignantly
his epic poem, until, at length, we interrupted him.
Desmond dressed like Buffalo Bill and had the hair,
mustache, goatee, and total Wild West Show regalia,
and he wept a little when we made him stop,

which made us feel we could have suffered longer.
Well, then I hitched with Tom up to Big Sur
and camped out on Kim Novak’s property,
which she allowed, and another hippie told us
her estate was named “Nepenthe,” and I waited
for her to ride out on her horse,

so I could tell her all about George Darley,
the late Romantic bard who wrote “Nepenthe,”
and who, afflicted with a dreadful stammer,
seldom socialized. Tom thought that Kim had always been
“a big hole in the screen,” but Vertigo was profound,
in part, because of Jimmy Stewart’s ability

to tap, at will, into untreated PTSD
from his wartime bombing raids, while Kim,
who looked like a perfect Siren in a dream,
would with her touching performance become
a ravishing advertisement for
romantic and deranged obsession.