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Poverty Music


ISSUE:  Winter 1996

Full moon and a siren wailing,
the freeway a quarter-mile off,
somnolent, never sleeping—half a cigarette gone,
when up the steps she comes
in search of an edge, the world
a verb in her throat: she is small,
her coat the color of sandalwood, and she weaves
her length in and out the wrought-iron railing
pleasurably in silence,
eschewing the hand’s advance,
showing a sensible mistrust of smoke,
then gone, caught up in her urges, her brief visitation
accomplished the way, tonight,
high-school kids with their throaty automobiles,
down some stretch of backroad,
in one, long diminishing harangue,
say so much with so little.

  *  

The world gives up its ghosts,
which walk among us and are us—
neighbors arranged in separateness,
stacked three-high in brown stone,
the rough traffic of days we think we enter
when it’s all an elaborate adieu,
a leave-taking allowed for and forgotten,
like the it in it’s snowing,
spoken casually, yet beyond dominion . . . .

  *  

I saw a crack of it, blue,
then the deeper ether.

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