Stream of Influence

Rainer Maria Rilke stands on a fish and Jim Harrison has his one good eye
aimed at a loon; the other hand on a gun pointing at a bear that looks like Ted Kooser
William Blake cautiously feeds the tiger striding on the ground where
Jack Ridl, on his tip-toes, scoops up a beetle and a nuthatch muttering, “garage door”

Billy Collins watches them all from behind an oak tree; drawing slow short
tokes on his cigarette, patting his dog, calmly suggesting “jazz” might
be the answer and anyhow-now-the retort of e.e. cummings is dryly,
“Spring!” and he being brand new smooth-zoomingly exits in his
am
bu     lance     to
play
the;
bon     gos       with

Richard Feynman who’s wondering if uncooked spaghetti
breaks in a predictable pattern to which William Stafford replies,
“Ask the flea in the Mountain.” upon which
Isaac Newton sets his fluxion-canon firing

with just enough impetus and report! to wake
Charles Simic from a black-and-white hangover
to put the clothes on the girl he met after
the Keith Jarrett concert as she [the night before]

parted from Robert Frost’s hair and boots hearing, actually, the song of
Carl Sandburg on a thin minimally travelled road seeking
solitude with another – despite the raining of hyacinths and biscuits --
somewhere behind Aldo Leopold’s cabin where tonight

a concert is about to begin
sometime between the past, eternity, and now
Salvador Dali squints at the program noticing:

Summer Concert Series #4: The Meeting of Bach, Dmitri Shostakovich and Led Zeppelin

violin: Albert Einstein
trumpet: Miles Davis
guitar: Carlos Montoya
bass: Edvard Grieg
drums: Stevie Wonder
piano: Herbie Hancock
vocals: Beastie Boys
Written and arranged by: Loren Eiseley
Conducted by: Captain America

In the audience Woody Allen leans into a joke about sex and death to an
unimpressed R.J. Oppenheimer who doesn’t even remove his pipe to
mutter in Sanskrit, “Love and death aren’t covariant – but music is light.”
behind him the Rabi Edwin Friedman is scribbling geneogramic triangles

for

Neil Postman who folds up his program, shoves it in his suit pocket and
harshly comments: “Wisdom?”