April Snow
We’d booked Phil Whalen
to do a reading in Taos,
we’d been trying to get him here for years.
We rented the biggest hall in town.
About noon it started snowing,
One of those big wet big wet snows.
The flakes clump together
on the way down
till they’re almost snowballs.
By evening it was
swirling in the headlights,
tree limbs broke under the weight,
sparking powerlines
writhed on the white streets.
Nobody with any sense
was going anywhere.
We slogged through
to the gig.
The audience was the couple
who’d driven Whalen up
from Santa Fe & us.
Phil read like it was Yankee Stadium
& he was a simple buddha.
That same snowbound night
someone had booked
the Newyorican-Chicano connection
into the Caffe Tazza,
Rudy Anaya, Jimmy ‘Santiago’ Baca,
Miguel Pinero, Lucky Cienfuegos,
Miguel Algarin, & Lucky’s honey, Candy.
As soon as Whalen finished
I sent him & his friends
home with Annie
& made it to the Tazza.
Five poets on the stage,
Andy Vargas was the audience.
When they finished
I took them home.
The giant snowflakes kept coming.
Weird auras over
the super market parking lots.
I fired up the wood stove.
Annie put everything we had
to eat & drink up on the counter.
Whalen was watching the snow
out the window & sipping wine.
We strung hammocks & laid out pads
all over the living room.
Pinero had a black satin jacket
With the NBC peacock & Miami Vice
embroidered in rainbow colors on the back.
Cienfuegos wore a brown leather vest,
no shirt & a Japanese flag for a headband.
Hello, we’re in a snowstorm.
Lucky was feeling no pain.
As the night rolled on
& the drugs got more serious,
Andy Vargas took Rudy Anaya
To sleep at his house.
The snow eased up.
The Sagans took Whalen
back to Santa Fe.
Lucky & Candy wanted to go to a motel,
that’s a whole other story.
Pinero & I stayed up all night
concocting & acting a drama.
We were old Puerto Rican janitors
retired on Social Security
who’d bought an upstate
New York chicken farm.
Nothing to do in winter
when snow covers the world,
so unlike the Island
where it’s warm all the time.
We moved closer to the stove
& the dialogue continued,
“Yup.” “Nope.” “Yup. “Nope.”
rabbit
Miriam's Well: Poetry, Land Art, and Beyond 
I love this Taos story of the snowstorm and the poets still carrying on with their mission and Phil Whalen being “a simple Buddha.” And I’m very glad Peter Rabbit is still booking poets in Taos–I miss the World Heavyweight Poetry Bouts there each summer! I love the humor and the dialogue too: “Yup.” “Nope.”