Of night, the river here is so black no one

With any intelligence would try

To tell you what it means.

*

In my light jacket, I stroll beside

The water. I am just going for a little walk.

Good-bye for a while, & good-bye to my pet names

For you—Wren, Fire, Threshold—names

Which only obscured you, & good-bye to songs the miner

Sings in the dead chill of winter, as he reaches up,

Headlamp on his helmet, to chip away at a vein

Of coal. And that sound, now, is so far away—

“God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen”—that I can hear,

Almost, but not quite, only his chipping away

At stone, as even that becomes a silence

In the way of something much more silent: “Let

Nothing you dismay.”

Variations

WHITMAN:

“I say we had better look our nation searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease.”

—Democratic Vistas

“Look for me under your bootsoles.”

On Long Island, they moved my clapboard house

Across a turnpike, & then felt so guilty they

Named a shopping center after me!

Now that I'm required reading in your high schools,

Teenagers call me a fool.

Now what I sang stops breathing.

And yet

It was only when everyone stopped believing in me

That I began to live again—

First in the thin whine of Montana fence wire,

Then in the transparent, cast-off garments hung

In the windows of the poorest families,

Then in the glad music of Charlie Parker.

At times now,

I even come back to watch you

From the eyes of a taciturn boy at Malibu.

Across the counter at the beach concession stand,

I sell you hot dogs, Pepsis, cigarettes—

My blond hair long, greasy, & swept back

In a vain old ducktail, deliciously

Out of style.

And no one notices.

Once, I even came back as me,

An aging homosexual who ran the Tilt-a-Whirl

At county fairs, the chilled paint on each gondola

Changing color as it picked up speed,

And a Mardi Gras tattoo on my left shoulder.

A few of you must have seen my photographs,

For when you looked back,

I thought you caught the meaning of my stare:

Still water,

Merciless.

A Kosmos. One of the roughs.

And Charlie Parker's grave outside Kansas City Covered with weeds.

Leave me alone.

A father who's outlived his only child.

To find me now will cost you everything.

SOME GRASS ALONG A DITCH BANK

I don't know what happens to grass.

But it doesn't die, exactly.

It turns white, in winter, but stays there,

A few yards from the ditch,

Then comes back in March,

Turning a green that has nothing

To do with us.

Mostly, it's just yellow, or tan.

It blends in,

Swayed by the wind, maybe, but not by any emotion,

Or partisan stripe.

You can misread it, at times:

I have seen it almost appear

To fight long & well

For its right to be, & be grass, when

I tried pulling it out.