Chants Elegiac
92
FREEZING RAIN
44
55
Body Fluid
SAURDAY MORNING IN AMERICA
856
92
Looking at the light
from a streetlamp
through tears of glass
blown by a windstorm
everything seems sad and tender
against the driving edge
the rushing and the fading into night.
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FREEZING RAIN
(lines for a harsh winter)
This grim day
every step reminds us of the danger
underfoot.
When we reach our destination,
with our sense of having survived
this crisis,
we bask in the glow
from the glory
of having arrived.
We talk about the weather
and remember those
who cannot be with us
because of ice
or other barriers
that cannot be crossed.
And i think to myself:
There is a trust among all living things
that each will survive,
each will go on living.
When one is held in violation
of that trust,
violation by intent
or without consent,
by accident or will,
in my anger i hold on to life.
My life that moves so fast and bright
and spinning round me
i reach out
reach out and grasp the light.
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44
Driving past an old graveyard
six minutes before midnight
the neat white rail fence
is painted ghastly by a half moon.
Why do they put the fences up?
Is it to keep the living out?
My tresspass would disturb no macabre revelry.
No keeper bars my way.
This fence is built of living fear
built to try and keep death in.
It will not work-
Death is not here.
It makes no claims within these bounds
but walks without and keeps its own.
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55
The morning after the fire
my soul still burns
as i, like a lizard,
crawl out onto a rock
to soak up the sun.
This is the spring
and i sing new songs
into the thunderstorm
approaching.
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Body Fluid
Today is silent,
damped by water.
i swim through air, almost fearing that i will dissolve-
i feel my edges
indistinctly
merging with my surroundings.
Bobbing to the top
of an air column,
song floats out of me
and around me.
i am dissolved.
i am liquid.
i feel the blood
flowing in my veins.
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SATURDAY MORNING IN AMERICA
On my pilgrimage
from Bethlehem to Baltimore,
riding down Interstate 83 past Harrisburg
too quickly i cross the Susquehanna
and the little ones that feed her.
This is the land she feed and supports,
and from bank to bank stretch bridges-
rows of spans and arches.
And resisting the water's current
a line of old stone supports
stands useless, no longer able
to hold bridges up.
This is the pattern
of ruin and abandonment,
seen in the stone foundations
no longer allowed to hold up buildings,
and also in the railroad yards
on unused tracks.
But far from the sludge dump,
away from vast parking lots near empty factories,
apart from clusters of houses
erected by unpracticed hand and eye
there are long, low fields
where the men and women
who have worked the land for centuries
repair and rebuild their houses
on old stone
given up by the land.
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856
Running
in shadows thrown by street lamps
i am astonshed to see,
around the shadow of my head
a halo, floating on dewy grass.
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