Secret they are, sealed, annealed, and brainless
And solitary as Dickens said, but
They have something to say: that there is more
Than one way to yield. The first — and the hardest.
The most nearly hindered — is when you pull
Them off the rocks, a stinking, sawing sedge
Sucking them back under the black mud, full
Greenland’ s icy mountains are fascinating and grand,
And wondrously created by the Almighty’ s command;
And the works of the Almighty there’ s few can understand:
Who knows but it might be a part of Fairyland?
Because there are churches of ice, and houses glittering like glass,
And for scenic grandeur there’ s nothing can it surpass,
Besides there’ s monuments and spires, also ruins,
Which serve for a safe retreat from the wild bruins.
Oh mighty City of New York! you are wonderful to behold,
Your buildings are magnificent, the truth be it told,
They were the only thing that seemed to arrest my eye,
Because many of them are thirteen storeys high.
And as for Central Park, it is lovely to be seen,
Especially in the summer season when its shrubberies and trees are green;
And the Burns’ statue is there to be seen,
Surrounded by trees, on the beautiful sward so green;
Also Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott,
Which by Englishmen and Scotchmen will ne’ er be forgot.
I stand and listen, head bowed,
to my inner complaint.
Persons passing by think
I am searching for a lost coin.
You’ re fired, I yell inside
after an especially bad episode.
I’ m letting you go without notice
or terminal pay. You just lost
another chance to make good.
But then I watch myself standing at the exit,
The trees are crystal chandeliers,
and deep in the hollow
a child pits its voice
against the rain.
The city screams its prayers
at the towers in the distance.
Those guitars again.
And the Catholic mantis
clutching at the sky,
a pearl of a city,
cuando se duerme.
I continue in my gbariye.
All things along my path are clean and white.
I have set out on a flute’ s quiet wave
in search of my dark love.
Divination and division mark my road;
yet, if I turn from left to right,
I walk the same straight path.
I carry the wine of salt water in my bag
to the crossroads of honey and milk.
I am puffed up and charged with the thought
of my own separation. From light to light,
I continue while the light lasts.
The light rests on my walking pole.
I continue.
Today is Sunday.
I fear the crowd of my fellows with such faces of stone.
From my glass tower filled with headaches and impatient Ancestors,
I contemplate the roofs and hilltops in the mist.
In the stillness — somber, naked chimneys.
Below them my dead are asleep and my dreams turn to ashes.
All my dreams, blood running freely down the streets
And mixing with blood from the butcher shops.
From this observatory like the outskirts of town
I contemplate my dreams lost along the streets,
Argument
I had a calling.
I took the call.
It was all I could do to follow the voice streaming into me
Like traffic on the runway where I lay
Down to gather.
I had a calling. I heard the geese bleat
In the firmament as they migrated
Into the jet’ s jets.
And could I have foreseen that falling
I could have fallen too
Rather than being sutured to the bottomless
Freeze-out lake.
For it is fine to lie within one’ s borrowed blankets
Looking up at the
Dropped ceiling coming down.
