When Keith comes to poetry group
in his fireman’s Blues, a small plug
leading from his left ear, radio
strapped to his waist, his
right ear may be tuned to Mary Ann’s
dream of a dying friend
or Patric’s poem about the devil
while the other monitors
the city’s troubles: crackups
and collisions, ambulance calls,
people stabbed or shot. Perhaps
his father calls him from beyond
death’s borders, or he intercepts
the smoldering thought of some
bruised girl-child, or gospel singing
from a sunlit church in Georgia
twenty years ago. When Keith
sits quiet in the tall wing chair
and secret fires play across his face,
we’re never sure what frequencies
he hears and whether the voice
will hold flowers or flame.
Drink
When we got to the spring
I made the customary speech:
whoever drinks the water
will surely return.
And though we both half-knew
you would not be coming back,
you picked a careful path
across damp stones and
buoyed with sudden hope,
put your mouth to the
pipe-mouth buried among
rocks and cress, to the mossy
O and drank. Since then
you have joined the silent
ones beyond all thirst
and hearing. Yet whenever I
bend to the green pipe,
it is you who bend with me
to drink, and you who enter
my mouth as water
rising from the aquifer
of memory to plunge again
into the secret tubes and
vessels of the body.
Junk
Everything begged to be saved:
three-legged tables, arthritic
chairs. The blind light-bulbs
and sprung valises longed to be lifted,
transformed. With his dreaming
eye, he saw them as they might become:
an altar wrapped in foil; the gimpy chair
reborn as throne—though it would not
support a child; six twinned
pedestals with flower-faces
strumming brassy music
of the unreal world. And over all,
emblazoned: Fear Not.
The kingdom of heaven is made of junk.
Laboring for years in the dark
garage, he built it, fettling forth
winged symmetries and curious
entablatures, a makeshift architecture,
tenuous as a spider’s web.
Transplanted into public view, it leans
toward sleep, still hoarding
its darkness. A velvet ribbon
bars the door to the unenterable room.
You walk away into sorrier streets
than any Hampton could have known.
All is in readiness.
