A YEAR IN POEMS 3/24/2021

"Driving a cardboard automobile without a license

                           at the turn of the century
             my father ran into my mother
                                               on a fun-ride at Coney Island
                  having spied each other eating
                                       in a French boardinghouse nearby
And having decided right there and then
                                         that she was for him entirely
       he followed her into
                                      the playland of that evening
          where the headlong meeting
                                         of their ephemeral flesh on wheels
                    hurtled them forever together 

And I now in the back seat
                                          of their eternity
                                                     reaching out to embrace them"

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "A Far Rockaway of the Heart, 2"

When Ferlinghetti died earlier this year, not only San Francisco but all of poetry lost its mad-cap voice. His poems were form-inspired, feisty, funny and grounded all at once - the voice of a lunatic cavorting under a spectacular and solemn moon.