There is this sunny place where I imagine him.
A park on a hill whose grass wants to
Into dust, & would do so if it
For the rain, & the fact that it is only
That keeps the park from flowing downhill
Its trees & past the slender figures in the statues.
Their stone blends in with the sky when the
Is overcast.
The stone is a kind of rain,
And half the soldiers trapped inside the
Are dead.
The others have deserted, & run home.
At this time in the morning, half sun, half mist,
There are usually three or four guys
Alone on benches facing away from one another.
If they're awake, they look as if they haven't slept.
If they're asleep, they look as if they may not wake....
I only imagine it as a sunny place.
If
Awake, they gaze off as if onto a distant landscape,
Not at the warehouses & the freeway the hill overlooks,
Not onto Jefferson Avenue where, later, they'll
To score a little infinity wrapped up in tinfoil,
Or a flake of heaven tied up in a plastic
And small as their lives are now, but at a
That is not the real city gradually
As the mist evaporates,
For in the real city,
One was kicked in the ribs by a night
Until he couldn't move.
Another wasA small time dealer until he lost his nerve,
And would have then become a car thief, if
The car had started.
And the last failed to appear,
Not only for a court date, but for life itself.
In these ways, they are like Poe if Poe had
Beyond composing anything, & had been kicked to
And then dismembered in this park, his
Thrown as far away from what was left of
As they could be thrown.
And they are not like Poe.
The three of them stare off at a city that is
In the distance, where they are loved for
Clear reason, a city they walk toward
They are themselves again, a
That vanishes each morning in the pale light.
Poe would have admired them, & pitied them.
For Poe detested both the real city with its
Crawling over the bridges, & the city that vanishes.~ ~ ~In autumn the rain slants & flesh turns white.
The tents go up again on the edge of town, &,
In the carny's spiel, everyone gets lost,
And Poe, dismembered, becomes no more than the
In the story of his life, the cautionary
No better than the sideshow where the
With sow's hoofs instead of hands, taps the glass—Some passing entertainment for the masses.
In the carny's spiel, everyone lost
Back again.
Even Poe comes back to
Himself, disfigured, in another.
That is
He's doing here, longing to mingle, invisibly,
With the others on the crowded midway as they
Their cotton candy, & stare
At one another.
He wants to see the
Who has fins instead of arms, & the man withoutA mouth.
He wants to see the boy behind
And his own clear reflection in the glass.
The carnival's so close, only a few blocks,
That he can hear the intermittent off key
Wheezing faintly out of the merry-go-round....
It might as well be music from the moon.
The traffic never lets him cross.
The weeks pass,
And then the months, & then the years with their
And the marquees going blank above the
Because no one comes anymore.
And the crowd,
Filing into the little tent, watches suspiciously,
For the crowd believes in nothing now but disbelief.
And therefore, at the intersection of
And death, the intersection of the real
And the one that vanishes,
Poe is
In the midst of traffic, one city inside the other.
The rain slants.
The flesh is a white dust.
The cars pass slowly through him, & the boy
Tapping at the glass, unable to tell his story.
