Kins of May
By Michael H. Kew
For Mini Marvin
And out swings May Day, a-bluster in billow and grayrainy tumult linking the world's hopeful eyes to Beltane, eve of my smiling father's 80th, his years on Earth laid bare here at the cold foot of spring.
And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth—
And with whole family in his choice restaurant we sip champagne and carouse. Celebrating the wheel of impermanence.
With soup my mother sits quietly. Through my father's dreams and love spawned her mirrored heartbeat of my Bohemian ancestry. Hanzlik. Maternal pedigree swooshing and stumbling from deep Czech to secret Salish, a blond braid burnt and twisted across frozen lakes and Rockies and Coast Range, my forefathers' glowing Slavic embers an inferno in the green gem rainforest, its May mycelia eventually spidering south like flowers of future fortune.
And of course up there hides the dusky full Flower Moon amid its penumbral eclipse above modern southOregon mists that finger the sweet valleys and skullcap their snowy peaks. Was a Czech polarity 53 years prior—the also-invisible NEW Moon swung away from poet/provocateur Allen Ginsberg as he goofed there in '65 amid Iron Curtain travels after his expulsion from Cuba at the height of Cold War.
And I am the King of May, which is long hair of Adam and the beard of my own body—
During the historically free-spirit youthFest of Majáles (first in 20 years) he was cardboard-crowned as the honorable May Day King by cheery beery polytechnics and paraded up and down the giddy ribbons of Prague, a city itching to shed Soviet-bloc Communists and Nazis that were soiling and poisoning minds (1966's Fest plunged into a riot).
Allen Ginsberg, Crowned May King, Prague, Czechoslovakia, May 1965. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Project.
And I am the King of May, in a giant jetplane touching Albion's airfield trembling in fear—
London-bound on May 7 Ginsberg poeticized, documenting his strange quasiroyal Czech interlude. Two weeks earlier my parents had wed in northern California. Ten+ years later I was delivered and middle-named Hanzlik to preserve my queenmother's vein.
And I am the King of May, which is old Human poesy, and 100,000 people chose my name—
Before revisiting Prague (his first trip fell in March) Ginsberg probed his maternal dirt in and around Moscow. Sent to America in 1905, same year an official Mother's Day was conceived, Naomi Ginsberg (née Levy) would later sag from severe psychosis, living in mental hospitals and gifted a lobotomy. Slain by a stroke in '56, same year Allen published Howl, an epic to me and millions—I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness—
And flown in upon a 91°F heatwave swoops here the crystal American silence of Mother's Day. Through the months from her diagnosis, mine speaks less and less. Fragments, confusions, her once-clear best-mind-of-generation sky slowly clouding, numbing. A Hanzlik heaven that rains tears for the rest of us. A Flower Moon wilting.
A Bohemian queen forced inward.
Outward meanwhile a few queens survived winter. Spermed last autumn and now freed from dormancy to nectarize and nest-build in the eaves and feed and breed teeming families of worker wasps. All in time for the seas of ruby rhododendrons and purple irises to bloom and for me to emotionally tune for my precious and dearly beloved Marvin (17yo tuxedo cat) to cross over his rainbow bridge.
More lights of impermanence.
And in bright Memorial Day summerflower warmth I wail about and squeeze heartpain of this sacred spring and feed and breed my own teeming rainbow-mind mycelia through the cold holy body of pilsner, ancestral chemistry blessed from the city of Plzeň (aka Pilsen) and its zen valleys of fertility.
Plzeň is West Bohemia's soul. Pilsner Urquell was my go-west grandfather's go-to. In his own way he too was a king of May. As is my father dearest. As was Marvin. My little muse who loved beer and jazz. But our real choices? Those we don't make? All that's well and good in life will forever start with queens. And sunshine dreams. And remember always—always—with your closest kin of smiling sheen.
(top) May 31; (above) May 1. Photos: Kew.
