Steve’s Sanctuary

for Steve Cannon

How you’d enter like Tiresias

Prophet for the “coming community”

What do you say, see in interior eye, right there: moment’s
breathing

How you enter poetry zones, sweet charge you take

And make welcome all, strays, devils too

And in your walk a gait for everyone who struggles

Where we might be in love with humanity’s crush.
         all brother …sister… whatever…. Neighbor- hoods…

How you’d exude awareness every step

Like to weep how you enter the room the hall the church the place
the street the stage & recognize eternity’s
poetry

How you enter & we see you coming like a trumpet announces,
O angels

And dear attendant at sleeve

How you held the confidence of poet up and beyond galaxies

How high does it go?

Very

A vow, focus, how many long years, Steve

And how bereft the night seems, the day, a dream, walking a world without you

Never a question how you set your great heart open all the
neighborhood

And Tribe?

Inner seer,

How it is your epitaph “Tribe” a fury of hope?

Let’s do it

Wit and solace in how you lived it

Inner canonical, tribal

You’d seen it all

& rejoiced



Anne Waldman is the author of over 60 plus volumes of poetry, poetics, and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment which won the Pen Center Literary Prize. Recent books include Bard,Kinetic,  Tendrel: A Meeting of Minds, Mesopotopia and the album Astral Omens. Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa University with the most celebrated poets in America, the Beat Generation.