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NOW NOW

San Francisco, Ca, 1965

David's poems “From the Tithes & Offerings” and “Silver Mirror” appeared in NOW NOW's second issue, among other notable contributors such as:

• Philip Whalen
• Gerard Malanga
• Harry Fainlight
• Bruce Conner
• David Moe
• Billy Jiddy
• William Lee
• Ken Irby
• Stella Levy
• David Bearden
• Ann Plymell
• Michael McClure
• Allen Ginsberg
• Lew Welch
• Paul A. Lundgren
• Leland S. Meyerzove
• Roxie G. Powell

To learn more about this publication, visit jstor.org or download PDF.

From The Tithes & Offerings

As he longed for the thick neck,
a rabble stinking of hell
came on like smegma in striking uniforms
of a hive of black

His strength a creek with pebbles...
Dipping a tactfull arm in boystrous joy;
"Craven in their shoe stores,
I smite the tawn foreskin of the oblivious phillistine."

After, he sept on someone's shield, (dreaming)
"I scored that time in very deed,
I shall groove like the lion aroused."
Though sleep took him out of action for years...

Courted in sleep...
O sought in divers ways,
his vision,
known vaguely now in flesh,
now as the wind
pouring through darkened trees portentously,
troubling his heart as looming memory,
came to him often.

But ignornat, and introvert
the vision came,
and stood in him a child
whose memories
are strange and blurred,
and worn by their own forms
to wraiths of wind...
to that not past
nor yet to come,
but blowing always through the sought and known,
infusing each quick thought: an apeiron.

And so it came to him that he must master
a Night of fine and troubling forms; a great disorder.
Yet let the webs in chaos
have their sway,
and not be torn,
and not be torn away,
nor broken by his asking.
He was to know the gold and silver stars,
the taste of wind,
the shadows in the trees...
and know these all unspeakably as this:

Judith where she is moist as fallen cake
is not Muliebrity?
Yet what is there...
a vague flesh
O in the dark wind,
is at the vision's quickest secret place.

Silver Mirror

Again he comes into the supra silver
glass: ogival window on The Other World
he watches silently. It makes him shiver,
as the Little Child confronts The Wolf,
as a ghost beard drifts from the moon
across the sleeping face of himself,
and fear comes.
…Wolf eye that frightened Stephen holds him now.