The Poet Named Richard Lyman

The Poet's Press is publishing a new edition of one of the earliest productions of our press, the 1971 chapbook, In the Silence of Scorpions, by Richard Lyman. Concerning the author, whom I have elsewhere described as the most forlorn and bedraggled poet in New York, I am only able to say this:

RICHARD LYMAN (1925- 2003) was the pseudonym of Richard Bush-Brown. He was active in the Greenwich Village poetry scene in the 1960s and early 1970s. 
The poet was the son of Harold Bush-Brown (1888-1983), a Harvard-trained architect and author of the 1976 book, Beaux Arts to Bauhaus and Beyond: An Architect’s Perspective (1976). His mother, Marjorie Conant Bush-Brown (1885-1978), was an artist and portrait painter, and both his paternal grandparents were artists. He was estranged from his parents, who disapproved of his youthful avowal of Communism. Only the fact of his birth is stated on web pages about his parents.
Bush-Brown attended Black Mountain College. His poetry is overshadowed by his reverence for Dylan Thomas. His poem, “The leopard came into the world” was his most memorable work, and his readings of it impressed listeners at New York poetry readings. On the strength of this poem, The Poet’s Press persuaded Bush-Brown to assemble the manuscript for this book.
No other details are known about the poet, who vanished from the Manhattan poetry scene, and so far as we know, he published no other books. 
He continued to live in Manhattan, was seen riding the subway to and from some Wall Street job, and died on October 18, 2003. 

Here is his best poem, a dark urban vision:

The leopard came into the world 
Came at half past one and left at midnight 
Lost in the eleven-hour city 
Picked up sticks at the railroad yards 
Swished his tail in the silence of lonely rooms 
Licked the kitten against the wrinkled wall 
Finding no break for the season’s evening ripening 
Into the trough of bludgeoned seas 
Finding in the waking dark the sun 
The leopard diamond-eyed at midnight 
Found his lost remorse between the open-eyed sea 
And the rails and trolleys of the dull freight-yard 
Among the pulleys of paradise he spied 
Among beggars and the screaming police 
The whisper and the whistler of the city’s bloom 
And then in the dark he expired like a bulb 
His flesh burned out against the dying wall of slums. 

This book will be published in PDF only, and will be the 243rd production of The Poet's Press.