There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight <br />Beyond the ledges of concrete <br />restaurants fall into dreams <br />with candlelight couples <br />Lost Alexandria still burns <br />in a billion lightbulbs <br />Lives cross lives <br />idling at stoplights <br />Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs <br />'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness' <br />A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window <br />A yogi speaks at Ojai <br />'It's all taking pace in one mind' <br />On the lawn among the trees <br />lovers are listening <br />for the master to tell them they are one <br />with the universe <br />Eyes smell flowers and become them <br />There's a deathless hush <br />on the freeway tonight <br />as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high <br />sweeps in <br />Los Angeles breathes its last gas <br />and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit <br />Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska <br />sinks with it <br />The sea comes over in Utah <br />Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles <br />Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere <br />An orchestra onstage in Omaha <br />keeps on playing Handel's Water Music <br />Horns fill with water <br />ans bass players float away on their instruments <br />clutching them like lovers horizontal <br />Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster <br />Skyscrapers filled like water glasses <br />Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine <br />Great Books watered down in Evanston <br />Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam <br />Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt <br />Manhatten Island swept clean in sixteen seconds <br />buried masts of Amsterdam arise <br />as the great wave sweeps on Eastward <br />to wash away over-age Camembert Europe <br />manhatta steaming in sea-vines <br />the washed land awakes again to wilderness <br />the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets <br />a cry of seabirds high over <br />in empty eternity <br />as the Hudson retakes its thickets <br />and Indians reclaim their canoes<br /><br />Lawrence Ferlinghetti<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/wild-dreams-of-a-new-beginning/