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Jim Kacian

nothing like

the funeral, three years ago, with all the stars gathered in the October sunshine to bid kid a fond adieu who had grown so old and neutral, Ginsberg in a parka and love beads, Holmes fedora'd and gray like your best friend's old man, Corso sad and serious and elegant, Creeley in his Gary Puckett phase, and others learned later to be Stella and Ann Charters and his Greek cousins, but not Neal, who had died on the road he could never get off, no, nothing like that tonight but the gray of the stones, the dark of the rain, a flutter of paper blowing through on an acidulous wind off the Merrimac, and myself with a bottle of sweet tokay in his honor . . .

off the road . . .
the unmarked grave
of Memory Babe