To close the week I’ll post Ginsberg’s poem Hospital Window, written in response to the last battle of the Vietnam War, mourning futile deaths in a futile war.

Here is the Wiki summary of the Mayaguez Crisis:

The Mayaguez incident took place between Kampuchea and the United States from May 12–15, 1975, less than a month after the Khmer Rouge took control of the capital Phnom Penh ousting the U.S. backed Khmer Republic. It was the last official battle of the Vietnam War. The names of the Americans killed, as well as those of three U.S. Marines who were left behind on the island of Koh Tangafter the battle and were subsequently executed by the Khmer Rouge, are the last names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The merchant ship’s crew, whose seizure at sea had prompted the U.S. attack, had been released in good health, unknown to the U.S. Marines or the U.S. command of the operation before they attacked. Nevertheless, the Marines boarded and recaptured the ship anchored offshore a Cambodian island, finding it empty

In response to the poem, I have been working over the last weeks on sketching still lives with bridges, looking from the inside out to a world where crossings lead us in all kinds of directions, challenged by longing and choices. The Brooklyn Bridge (above), part of the poem below, is among them.

Hospital Window

At gauzy dusk, thin haze like cigarette smoke 
ribbons past Chrysler Building’s silver fins 
tapering delicately needletopped, Empire State’s 
taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks 
black and white apartmenting veil’d sky over Manhattan, 
offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven–The East 
50’s & 60’s covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied 
tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green trees 
surrounding Rockefellers’ blue domed medical arbor– 
Geodesic science at the waters edge–Cars running up 
East River Drive, & parked at N.Y. Hospital’s oval door 
where perfect tulips flower the health of a thousand sick souls 
trembling inside hospital rooms. Triboro bridge steel-spiked 
penthouse orange roofs, sunset tinges the river and in a few 
Bronx windows, some magnesium vapor brilliances’re 
spotted five floors above E 59th St under grey painted bridge 
trestles. Way downstream along the river, as Monet saw Thames 
100 years ago, Con Edison smokestacks 14th street, 
& Brooklyn Bridge’s skeined dim in modern mists– 
Pipes sticking up to sky nine smokestacks huge visible– 
U.N. Building hangs under an orange crane, & red lights on 
vertical avenues below the trees turn green at the nod 

of a skull with a mild nerve ache. Dim dharma, I return 
to this spectacle after weeks of poisoned lassitude, my thighs 
belly chest & arms covered with poxied welts, 
head pains fading back of the neck, right eyebrow cheek 
mouth paralyzed–from taking the wrong medicine, sweated 
too much in the forehead helpless, covered my rage from 
gorge to prostate with grinding jaw and tightening anus 
not released the weeping scream of horror at robot Mayaguez 
World self ton billions metal grief unloaded 
Pnom Penh to Nakon Thanom, Santiago & Tehran. 
Fresh warm breeze in the window, day’s release 
from pain, cars float downside the bridge trestle 
and uncounted building-wall windows multiplied a mile 
deep into ash-delicate sky beguile 
my empty mind. A seagull passes alone wings 
spread silent over roofs.

May 20, 1975 Mayaguez Crisis 
Allen Ginsberg

Music today:Three Manhattan Bridges….https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw5L_orYl8I