“Frank,” I say,
“the dead, those doorstops, are fine by me,”
and turn the gas so low my poem almost gutters out.
Still, in the landscape,
a red flame glints –
a fleck of flesh.
“But poetry is zippy,” Frank exclaims.
“What is it with you
and the downbeat?”
We are staring at the sunset
bulging against the window.
And at the crows.
We love the crows –
the dark snout of them among the trees.
So ungainly, so light, they are scattered
all over the yard, clinkers. Cold coals.
Here, poetry is not too easy
as most things are
the dull particulars of Mirror Street
one beside the other.
We drink and smoke.
I quote Frank to Frank: “I miss myself,” I say,
because this morning, pawing through his poems,
Manhattan came back to me like a heart attack.
I miss that saturnine, bookish, sexy,
fragment of a bedroom on West 10th
its windows filled with the maple’s
leafy reach, the creak and lurch of swings, the bicyclettes.
I was so intelligent and lonely
stuck up there under the dark eaves of my mind…
“And what,” I demand, “ happened to those years of art and sorrow?
To the misfortunes of Kline, and Pollock, and Peter Beck
and the man who whispered in the keyhole
“Frank is dead”
and the way half New York sank down and wept?”
A flock of crows reels past, cindery and remote.
“Poetry is a bat out of hell,” says Frank.
