minga, jerry

minga, jerry

i saw you without a touch of grey
in the fillmore, purple with mescaline--
one young beast not to be tamed

at a race track in Maine, you floated
100,000 freaks up into the night sky
and set 'em down, with a soft glove

in a hockey rink at UMaine, you destroyed
a beautiful mushroom high with bad
sound and something aching in your heart

then, my best bud forced me to come to Boston Garden
and while he spent 2000 years in nirvana (surrounded
by incredible, grinning facsimiles of us, 25 years ago)
you restored the Sistine Chapel with jazz and Persian rugs


this June, on a whim, i took my last two kids to Vermont:
through the Highgate, we passed into the moving feast
you created; they could taste the community

which was more than just the music (because we knew
each night was just one more bead on your necklace of notes,
your endless sharing of the noodles in your head)

yet strangely, it was the same gathering, the same family it had been
that  night on the lower east side, or in SanFran (before the money
came), just garbage cans full of a new way to look at things

and my kids felt that (sprung from hippie shanties
in the Maine woods), they recognized that shared vision
they shook with the power of being part of the show.


so now, on some unnoticeable wednesday, you just up-and-leave
us; lucky you, now you can just play,
while we will forever watch that hot Vermont moon come up

grey-haired and bearded, only a bit younger than you
and wonder whether you would change a single lick,
now that you are finally
high enough to see.