Huntington, Long Island
At night before the dark swells of sleep,
Walt, I think of your strong arms
that embrace whole cities, vast membranes
of streetlamp and neon, lit by the inner electric
of a million souls, where brewery workers
bet the Redbirds for the play-offs,
dirt farmers fight the locust of hard laws,
and adolescent boys, all decibel and testosterone,
dream of rapture in shiny cars. I think how your limbs,
tattooed with words, enthrall shopgirls
learning about the new deal at night school,
and bodybuilders whose flesh has stopped at midboil,
people who will one day betray their dreams,
and people who have not forgotten how to wish,
stockbrokers and deckhands and tailors and dancers,
all working in throbbing honeycombs of light,
despite the silent metronomes inside.
Yours is the counterpoint that wakes them from sleep;
yours the spark that sets brushfires in their veins,
in the skyscrapers and row houses and tenements
and lofts where, at dusk, whole passages of light
just vanish into time. You take me to their outposts,
On a bench in your yard, while a sweat bee licks
beads from my leg, I dream of your radiant white fever
jetting into me, until my backbone lunges—
a mountain range; my hips quiver wide—a Mercator projection;
worlds career on my tongue with subways,
politics, waterfalls, county fairs,
and, in an opera athletic as the land,
I drink from your source and swell large as life.