They say down on the street

there’s poison in the holy water,

they say all the hospital locks are burst up on the violent ward,

they say you can lean in at the squad car window

to buy your drugs, they say that Vinnie died

just from breathing the air

 

Heart like a mirror, heart like a desert,

tell me the way the world will take

here on the forked and shadowed road,

heart like a thorn hedge,

heart like a well

 

I was just dreaming that the wings of charity

beat in a shimmering rush in among the circling flocks of pigeons

all along the avenue, I was just dreaming

that golden justice was seeping like groundwater

into the courthouse basements, I was just dreaming

that good and ill were thrashing in contention

deep in the pit of the human heart

and that slowly the red dragon began

to tread down the white worm of evil

 

On the street they say the high sheriff

pimps for his two small sons, they say

the cyanide in the baby’s food

was put there on orders from the factory foreman,

they say the Chaplain General

runs a school for torturers, they say

that from the cargo doors of government planes

bitter powders are leaking

to be whirled away in the Santa Ana

 

Heart like a spyglass, heart like a jailhouse,

tell me the way the world will take

here on the twisting rain-slick highway,

heart like a padlock,

heart like a sail

 

I was just dreaming

that I heard the shiver of the thundering subway

moaning in the bones of my building,

and this is what it said:

The anvil of virtue is uncovered; love begins to smolder

in the long-cold forges of the earth

 

I was just dreaming that I heard

Arthur sit up on the rough-hewn couch of stone

amid the startled chittering of the bats,

staring at the blue slate walls,

working the stiffness from his strong right hand