Letter from Emmett Grogan to Peter Berg, ca. 29 April 1967 from El
Rito, New Mexico
[Located in the Digger Archive, Catalog No. DP024. Note: spelling
errors are in original.]
Peter:
Just read a Niel Cassady letter and seems all our fathers are nearing
retirement - the years are pushing them into a strange calm. A tired
restless soft year.
Never worked on myself as I have been these two weeks. Interesting
changes. Seldom talk to strangers anymore - know to many already.
Hunt every morning from dawn til I stop - from dusk til night - myself
always as target. Not stiff anymore. Death is alert. I seem to be
adjusting to life. It tastes like salt on a cold morning - or chile when
you know it's going to snow and your pants are ripped. Ho hum ... the
Ginsberg-Orlovsky came through - Julius speaks in rhyme to the time for a
dime anytime for a brother. He cried when he left. Allen proved to be a
good-polite-mad-rabbinical-man. As always. Peter was a bore.
I've seen porchipines, rabbits, robins, hawks, vultures, crows, steer,
mice, squirrels, fox, lamb, deer, turkey, and tried to talk to elk, but I
can't seem to want to enough to bother to try harder.
Five thousand smiles grin between the leaves of forest green browns and
life is close to the decay -- bullshit.
Saturday 29 - Larry Bird - me tumbled onto a Be-In meeting with the
Hopi - Alpert, P.H.D and his friends (who ALL own or work in tourist shops
here in New Mexico.) The Hopi told them to fuck off and we left, but next
day we heard Be-In planned for Raton-Pass New Mexico June 21 - solstice -
sent Comm. Co. a rundown on the scam - try to publicize the extent of this
merchant shuck -
Fritch told me run of Solstice in park - make it more - punch the
medea in the face - put Krassner to work and make it more - and if any
cows stray into the garden cut their legs off. Natural Suzanne and I live
in woods in tent and drink lots of coffee and wonder when it will rain and
if it does what will it mean and if it does so what. Watch a shooting star
every time and it crowds my imagination. There's vastness here. Any you -
Judy - and the boy should come for a-while sometime.
Thin long bird with a taste for snakes' eyes frayed tail, wildcat claws
his pinions are bludgeons. Few brains, topped by a crown and a flair for
swift in-fighting - try to take it from him. (The road-runner is Larry
Bird's clan - he says nothing).
Natural Suzanne sends love - the wind whispers the unnaturalness of all
our considerations and by god it's funny to sound like Pound taking a
break translating the simple madness of a small Chinese poet who never
learned to write THE in Big Letters.
c/o Larry Bird P.O.B. 13, El Rito - New Mexico
Tell Fritch that a guy in Alberqueque, N.M. printed Doyle's poem and
gave it out to 3000 people.
Grogan |
