Free Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac Page B

divide into a billion counterparts and come oozing out of parted-sands (black and oily and blue) like as if someone were squeezing the earth from below—There’ll be new fish—There’ll be There’ll-be Himself—
    All of a sudden tossed wars of tree-tops will be warmer wars and less dry and crackety ones, and there’ll be rumors and singing down the hillsides as snow melts, running for cover under the bloody light, to join the river’s big body—So that Ocean will again receive her swollen rent, as ever April, yet, landlord without end, be none the richer and with such coffers bottomless how the poorer possible?—In the ocean there is a Spring, deep and verdurous we cant estimate, so I sing the surface one, the Spring that makes us feel so sad and fair, and morning air brings nostalgic cigarette smoke from holy hopey smokers—When hats are whipped and finally succumb, coats flap and run their stories out, and vests disappear, and shirtsleeves are hoisted of a sudden afternoon April 26 and the ballgame is on—The time when all the earth is black with sap—No end to what you could say about Spring, and in that locked-in New England Spring is a big event, long coming, short staying, it flows by as fast as a flooded river—In that river you can see the accumulated debris of seventeen thousand fecundities up the both shores clear to the maw of the well where she began—Marble’d melt in such country at the time, and add veins to the color in the river—Children run out exhilarated as princes and knights, illustriously insane as ancient fools, to weirdly fool in fields and down river banks; to at that time put them behind a knife-carved schooldesk is like asking Thane to stow his Ice Axe and say farewell to his Prow—It is the dizzy lyrical time, airy, ethereal, mists are bright, the sun is never exactly golden, never exactly silver, never exactly bright, never exactly dark, never for a long time dimmed, but races continual eye dazzling wars, reaches everywhere throughout textures of clouds and shows birds’ shining wings—And when the first buds appear on bushes and trees, and your heartborne blossoms float to commemorate new Awakened Ones and fall in migholes and on hopskotch trails, Vaya, then, night coming, and the round horizon all about reverberates with roars of all-sigh all-world all-men Shush War, you’ll know, by the fence, the sad wooden American fences and under the promised yellow moon, the pierce of the arrow of April in your flesh, the promise accounted for in the Tablets of Hardworking Man’s Beardy Serious Prophets: namely, ecstasy of living and dying . . .
    You’ll have your cold wars and warm peaces, the frotting and rubbings of all things on all sides, the ecstasy general, orgasms, screams of passion, rites of Spring, May, June, July and the Bees—No matter what anyone says, you’ll have it, you’ll dream you have it and so like the popular lovesong says, You’ll Have It.
    Blossoms fluttered from the trees and crossed contrarious Gerardo’s windowpane, he would not balmy truck with Spring and swell with it, but wasted like Sacrosanct and ill-timed Autumn, out of his element—Like my father exactly 20 years later, he was dying during the Resurrection and the Life Renewed.
    He was getting worse. Rarely now we saw him out of bed and about the kitchen. Our visits to his beside were still, for he slept a lot. My mother grew rings around her sleepless eyes, and prayed late and rose early to praise early—Her nerves were so shot she was losing her teeth one by one, her stomach was a mass of gelid anxious phenomena, like swarms of snakes—The Snake of Inevitability was rising up and eating the Duluozes.
    My father had more time to avoid the sight of his little boy’s death, by busying by burying himself in details of his work at the shop—And as heartbreaking April blossomedburst into May and