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.

~