#19 – LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

So rent a museum

and see yourself in mirrors –

In every room an exposition

of a different phase in your life

with all your figures and faces

and pictures of all the people who

passed through you

and all the scenes

you passed through

all the landscapes of living

and longing and desiring

and spending and getting

and doing and dying

and sighing and laughing and crying

(what antic gesturing!)

And walking through the house of yourself

you climb again to all

the rooms of yourself

full of the other lives & selves

who passed through them

Rooms rooms rooms

piled up haphazard

in the architecture of time

And all the bodies clinging to each other

or rushing to windows

to break out of the room

which they boxed themselves into

All the people of your life

in one house in the night

all lights lit

like a cruise ship at sea

From the collection “A Far Rockaway of the Heart”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  1. This isn’t the entirety of the poem.

    And you run up and down
    knocking on all the doors
    through which you hear
    all the once-familiar voices
    laughing or sobbing or singing
    And you run to the roof
    and look up to the mute night sky
    And in the wheeling template of stars
    see the faces the figures
    of the lovely lovers who
    had once made time stand still
    now all fixed
    in their constellated relations
    motionless in time
    So that
    some day
    as time bends around
    to its beginning again
    you find them all again
    and yourself

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