Vigil

The bike, the handlebars, the fork,

spoked wheels still spinning off sun,

still letting go his weight as he

lay in the grass along Docena Road

just hours after the bomb went off

under the church steps downtown,

four girls dead, though they hadn't heard,

Virgil with a bullet in his heart, Virgil Ware

who wanted a bike for a paper-route

who perched on his brother's handlebars

and caught the white boys' bullet

but never got a bike or a headstone

or a 14th birthday, Virgil and his brother

and the bike in the grass off Docena Road.

The handlebars, fork, and iron diamond

frame that held them both, warming

in the Alabama sun. Stars of paint and chrome

that rained all over north Birmingham,

up and down the Docena-Sandusky road,

nesting like crickets in the weeds.

And the seat, wearing at the edges,

the cushion opening like a cattail

to the wind. But the frame, still holding

handed down and down and down

till bright as a canna. Then laid

with its brothers in a tangle in the sun.

Then gathering heat and darkening.

Then weeds insinuating the fork,

Let their flowers open from the mouths

of the handlebars and the seat-post.

Let them be gathered from the frame

and the frame raised up. Let it be

hot to the touch. Let its rust burn

into the finest creases of the hand

and the warp of the shirtsleeve and the pants

and worked into the temples' sweat.

Then let it descend into the furnace like a hand

that opens all its rivers, each tribute,

each channel, each buried town.

Let it gather this heat, this fire, hold it all.

Let the crucible door open like a mouth

and speak its bloom of light, molten and new.

Let me stand in its halo. Let me stand

as it pours out its stream of suns.

Let me gather and hold it like a brother.

And let it burn.