Classic Poem

on the hill is cool! Even the dead
grass stems that start with the wind along
the crude board fence are less than harsh.

— a broken fringe of wooden and brick fronts
above the city, fading out,
beyond the watertank on stilts,
an isolated house or two here and there,
into the bare fields.

The sky is immensely
wide! No one about. The houses badly
numbered.

Sun benches at the curb bespeak
another season, truncated poplars
that having served for shade
served also later for the fire. Rough
cobbles and abandoned car rails interrupted
by precipitous cross streets.

Down-hill
in the small, separate gardens (Keep out
you) bare fruit trees and among tangled
cords of unpruned grapevines low houses
showered by unobstructed light.

Pulley lines
to poles, on one a blue
and white tablecloth bellying easily.
Feather beds from windows and swathed in
old linoleum and burlap, fig trees. Barrels
over shrubs.

Level of
the hill, two old men walking and talking
come on together.

— Firewood, all lengths
and qualities stacked behind patched
out-houses. Uses for ashes.
And a church spire sketched on the sky,
of sheet-metal and open beams, to resemble
a church spire —

— These Wops are wise

— and walk about
absorbed among stray dogs and sparrows,
pigeons wheeling overhead, their
feces falling —

or shawled and jug in hand
beside a concrete wall down which,
from a loose water-pipe, a stain descends,
the wall descending also, holding up

a garden — On its side the pattern of
the boards that made the forms is still
discernible. — to the oil-streaked
highway —

Whence, turn and look where,
at the crest, the shoulders of a man
are disappearing gradually below the worn
fox-fur of tattered grasses —

And round again, the
two old men in caps crossing at
a gutter now, Pago, Pago! still absorbed.

— a young man's face staring
from a dirty window — Women's Hats — and
at the door a cat, with one fore-foot on
the top step, looks back —

Scatubitch!

Sacks of flour
piled inside the bakery window, their
paley trade-marks flattened to
the glass —

And with a stick,
scratching within the littered field —
old plaster, bits of brick — to find what
coming? In God's name! Washed out, worn
out, scavengered and rescavengered —

Spirit of place rise from these ashes
repeating secretly an obscure refrain:

This is my house and here I live.
Here I was born and this is my office —

— passionately leans examining, stirring
with the stick, a child following.

Roots, salads? Medicinal, stomachic?
Of what sort? Abortifacient? To be dug,
split, submitted to the sun, brewed
cooled in a teacup and applied?

Kid Hot
Jock, in red paint, smeared along
the fence. — and still remains, of —
if and if, as the sun rises, rolls and
comes again.

But every day, every day
she goes and kneels —

died of tuberculosis
when he came back from the war, nobody
else in our family ever had it except a
baby once after that —

alone on the cold
floor beside the candled altar, stifled
weeping — and moans for his lost
departed soul the tears falling
and wiped away, turbid with her grime.

Covered, swaddled, pinched and saved
shrivelled, broken — to be rewetted and
used again.