An Ode for him

Ah Ben!

Say how, or when Shall we thy Guests

Meet at those Lyrick Feasts, Made at the Sun, The Dog, the triple Tunne?

Where we such clusters had,

As made us nobly wild, not mad; And yet each Verse of thine

Out-did the meate, out-did the frolick wine.

My Ben

Or come agen: Or send to us,

Thy wits great over-plus; But teach us yet Wisely to husband it;

Lest we that Talent spend:

And having once brought to an end That precious stock; the store

Of such a wit the world should have no more.

-ROBERT HERRICK, 1848

BAREFOOT CONDUCTS HIS seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.

After I parked my Honda Civic in the metered slot I sat listening to the radio. Already all the Beatles songs ever written could be heard on every frequency. Shit, I thought. I feel like I'm back in the Sixties, still married to Jefferson Archer.

"Where's Gate Five?" I asked two hippies going by.

They didn't answer. I wondered if they'd heard the news about John Lennon. I wondered, then, what the hell I cared about Arabic mysticism, about the Sufis and all that other stuff that Edgar Barefoot talked about on his weekly radio program on KPFA in Berkeley. The Sufis are a happy lot. They teach that the essence of God isn't power or wisdom or love but beauty. That's a totally new idea in the world, unknown to Jews and Christians. I am neither. I still