Elegy For Poe With The Music Of A Carnival Inside It

There is this sunny place where I imagine him.

A park on a hill whose grass wants to turn

Into dust, & would do so if it weren't

For the rain, & the fact that it is only grass

That keeps the park from flowing downhill past

Its trees & past the slender figures in the statues.

Their stone blends in with the sky when the sky

Is overcast. The stone is a kind of rain,

And half the soldiers trapped inside the stone

Are dead. The others have deserted, & run home.

At this time in the morning, half sun, half mist,

There are usually three or four guys sprawled

Alone on benches facing away from one another.

If they're awake, they look as if they haven't slept.

If they're asleep, they look as if they may not wake....

I only imagine it as a sunny place. If they're

Awake, they gaze off as if onto a distant landscape,

Not at the warehouses & the freeway the hill overlooks,

Not onto Jefferson Avenue where, later, they'll try

To score a little infinity wrapped up in tinfoil,

Or a flake of heaven tied up in a plastic bag

And small as their lives are now, but at a city

That is not the real city gradually appearing

As the mist evaporates, For in the real city,

One was kicked in the ribs by a night watchman

Until he couldn't move. Another was

A small time dealer until he lost his nerve,

And would have then become a car thief, if only

The car had started. And the last failed to appear,

Not only for a court date, but for life itself.

In these ways, they are like Poe if Poe had lived

Beyond composing anything, & had been kicked to death

And then dismembered in this park, his limbs

Thrown as far away from what was left of him

As they could be thrown. And they are not like Poe.

The three of them stare off at a city that is there

In the distance, where they are loved for no

Clear reason, a city they walk toward when

They are themselves again, a city

That vanishes each morning in the pale light.

Poe would have admired them, & pitied them.

For Poe detested both the real city with its traffic

Crawling over the bridges, & the city that vanishes.

~ ~ ~

In autumn the rain slants & flesh turns white.

The tents go up again on the edge of town, &,

In the carny's spiel, everyone gets lost,

And Poe, dismembered, becomes no more than the moral

In the story of his life, the cautionary tale

No better than the sideshow where the boy

With sow's hoofs instead of hands, taps the glass—

Some passing entertainment for the masses.

In the carny's spiel, everyone lost comes

Back again. Even Poe comes back to see

Himself, disfigured, in another. That is what

He's doing here, longing to mingle, invisibly,

With the others on the crowded midway as they lick

Their cotton candy, & stare expressionlessly

At one another. He wants to see the woman

Who has fins instead of arms, & the man without

A mouth. He wants to see the boy behind glass

And his own clear reflection in the glass.

The carnival's so close, only a few blocks,

That he can hear the intermittent off key music

Wheezing faintly out of the merry-go-round....

It might as well be music from the moon.

The traffic never lets him cross. The weeks pass,

And then the months, & then the years with their wars

And the marquees going blank above the streets

Because no one comes anymore. And the crowd,

Filing into the little tent, watches suspiciously,

For the crowd believes in nothing now but disbelief.

And therefore, at the intersection of radiance

And death, the intersection of the real city

And the one that vanishes, Poe is pausing

In the midst of traffic, one city inside the other.

The rain slants. The flesh is a white dust.

The cars pass slowly through him, & the boy keeps

Tapping at the glass, unable to tell his story.