Those days, those days,

the sirens howled in packs like wolves;

deep-voiced engines roared southward

down every window-walled canyon

 

Oh it's bright in this room;

the sunrise pours into the diner,

but to the leaves rustling outside in the infant autumn,

to the sugared breakfast rolls,

the thick clean chipped china plate,

the pillow of scrambled eggs yellow as summer sunlight

and the squat mug steaming with coffee, that treasure of Araby,

to the honey-haired waitress with her weary smile,

to the sweet particularity of the everyday world, to all these

he turns a blind and bitter eye.

Dressed and fed and ready,

he strides briskly away with his comrades;

the door to the diner creaks in the breeze,

carelessly left ajar

 

Who takes delivery of these nineteen letters

to the Merciful, the Compassionate?

Look! Bones in a black silk glove:

the greedy open palm

of Death the All-Thief

 

Your god and his god and her god

and their book and your book

and your land and their land

and their people and your people

and your flag and their flag

 

When childhood ended, from Brooklyn

I made my way to imperial Manhattan;

I went up for my schooling to The Bronx:

the word home in my mouth

means New York

 

It is the city that has every tongue

and every people and every god

and no god; buildings there are like mountains;

there are seven hundred miles of track and

billions of bricks and underground rivers

in cold house-high iron pipes,

millions of miles of copper wire and light-bearing cable;

there are battered wooden fruit stands

hard by shops glittering with the loot of the earth;

there are restaurants, their chambers

are like castle conservatories or Balkan inns,

they'll serve you there a meal of eye-glazing delight,

flavors you can't even put a name to;

and see, a few doors along the block

are grimy curbside tables of ragged books

and, further down, bare-bones coin-driven laundries,

and everything is for sale,

everything: baby-faced whores

with heavy hips and improbable costumes

haunt the night-time corners of industrial streets

in the low-down riverside districts,

and the cars prowling on the down-low

slow down to ask, exhausts

smoking in the icy air

 

Your god and his god and her god

and their book and your book

and your land and their land

and their people and your people

and your grief and their grief

 

At the end of an evening, rolling back downtown,

staring through the cab's passenger window:

this mesmeric landscape

 

Overlapping anarchic textures

of this endless forest of street and structure:

herringbone brick and fitted stone blocks;

polished steel and black pitted iron;

glass illumined from within, glass

like inkpool mirrors; the carved wooden doors

of old synagogues and the peeling wooden doors

of Irish saloons and the brazen doors

of the Salvation Army fortress;

the blank-featured front of frowning St. Vincents,

at once sinister and comforting;

two men quick-stepping past the glowing letters, EMERGENCY,

south on Seventh with shoulders hunched

and hands clutched at the collars

of their insufficient dress topcoats;

hypnotic jittering strobe bars of the ambulances

that swarm, bees at the hive's gate,

about the ramp to that room

where you go in your desperate hour and where,

like home, they'll always take you in;

a flurry of green-clad nurses about a gantry;

off to the side a pair of cops conversing in the shadows,

half-revealed by the gleam from the admitting entrance,

stolid and self-confident, their thumbs hooked

in those twenty-five-pound equipment belts;

across Greenwich are the terracotta friezes

that run along the second-story tenement ledges,

where the burbling pigeons seek refuge,

sleeping fluffed out in the chilly darkness

 

Your god and his god and her god

and their book and your book

and your land and their land

and their people and your people

and your outrage and their outrage

 

This is the city of Algonquin ghosts

moving down long slantward Algonquin Broadway;

this is the city of electron transfers of wealth:

fortunes flicker in by satellite from Europe,

fortunes flicker out to Asia;

this is the city that could populate a small country;

this is the city of one hundred seventy-six languages;

this is the city where millions

make the round of the hours, tramping alleys and boulevards,

or bucketing along below-ground

on the knife-narrow twinned-iron roads,

or backing from the dock on the bluff-bowed ferry,

the booming wash from the propellor screws

curling up the base of the pilings

and a strip of water widening

between Staten Island and the guard-chains aft;

some take to the air, whirling sideways and aloft

from the Hudson-bank heliports

 

Away in Queens, in the little bodega, the mother

places two loaves of bread on the tin-top counter;

the grocer ambles over to the register;

the sun trundles free of the skyline and the morning

opens like a lily

 

Your god and his god and her god

and their book and your book

and your land and their land

and their people and your people

and your revenge and their revenge

 

The huge library is luminous;

the tall windows are beacons, warm and golden,

through the blue-gray twilight of the snowstorm;

the insouciant lion sentries

stretch out in the gloom

 

Our word is “Excelsior” and yes

we do mount up ever higher and yes

we are the New Tower of Babel

and no this does not bother us

and yes we wear black clothes

all the time and yes we think

that you are walking too slowly,

and are not quite clever enough

 

Your god and his god and her god

and their book and your book

and your land and their land

and their people and your people

and your pride and their pride

 

Those nights, those nights,

from my bedroom window I watched

the opalescent glow of the high-intensity lights

rebounding, scattering its spillover radiance upward,

shining on the belly of the smoke column,

that huge formless ghost that rose hour upon hour

from the tip of this haunted island

 

And somewhere below the smoke,

the powder-fine dead;

and somewhere above the smoke,

the stars, beautiful

as the scattered high-floor windows

that once could be seen, lit night-long

by the wakeful cleaning crews,

one hundred storeys up

 

Oh it's dim in this room, but not yet

so dark or so late that we can't see to shuffle,

again, that deck of tear-stained tarot

and grimly deal out a row, one by one

and face up, and all the while,

in between the greasy slither and slap

of each tattered card, the useless muttering:

If only, if only

 

And somewhere below the smoke,

the drifting dustbowl dead;

and somewhere above the smoke

the stars, beautiful

as the streetlamps that once could be seen,

strewn like embers from here

to the shadowy far horizon,

one hundred storeys down

 

—from the collection Iron Rose: New York Poems