LOS ANGELES MOMENT, 1998

Sharing a large cup
of Orange Julius
with a homeless runaway
from the Big Apple
a once flower child
Tish now about thirty hides
behind black sunglasses
as she quotes to me from
O'Hara's "Lunch poems"
Ginsberg's Kaddish
and then recites by heart
on a city bench
the wish lines of Alfred Jarry
from his play Ubu Roi
with perfect memory
in a French accent
emerges from a pup tent
on the sidewalk
holding a lottery ticket,
this former childhood star
of Hollywood,
near her is a media camera
that her brother Rusty carries
in his beat up car
tells me she sleepwalks
despite her terrific stamina,
that she is in the business arts
worked at the Ritz
making gowns for starlets
speaks in several languages
and got use to play bit parts
now collects tortoise shells
from the Pacific
which she paints and sells;
Tish was raised on a commune
in Butte, Montana
where her sick dad perished
in the copper mines,
later she met Kenneth Rexroth
at a poetry seminar here
a few years ago
even knew his birthday
was on December 22
once played in a Western soap opera
called "Reckoned in the Dust"
with her brother Rusty
a stunt driver and as an extra
she asked me for a quarter
and passes out her verses
in iambic pentameter
on pink paper mache.