THE STREET

Streaked and fretted with effort, the thick

Vine of the world, red nervelets

Coiled at its tips.

All roads lead from it. All night

Wainwrights and upholsterers work finishing

The wheeled coffin

Of the dead favorite of the Emperor,

The child’s corpse propped seated

On brocade, with yellow

Oiled curls, kohl on the stiff lids.

Slaves throw petals on the roadway

For the cortege, white

Languid flowers shooting from dark

Blisters on the vine, ramifying

Into streets. On mine,

Rockwell Avenue, it was embarrassing:

Trouble—fights, the police, sickness—

Seemed never to come

For anyone when they were fully dressed.

It was always underwear or dirty pajamas,

Unseemly stretches

Of skin showing through a torn housecoat.

Once a stranger drove off in a car

With somebody’s wife,

And he ran after them in his undershirt

And threw his shoe at the car. It bounced

Into the street

Harmlessly, and we carried it back to him;

But the man had too much dignity

To put it back on,

So he held it and stood crying in the street:

“He’s breaking up my home,” he said,

“The son of a bitch

Bastard is breaking up my home.” The street

Rose undulant in pavement-breaking coils

And the man rode it,

Still holding his shoe and stiffly upright

Like a trick rider in the circus parade

That came down the street

Each August. As the powerful dragonlike

Hump swelled he rose cursing and ready

To throw his shoe—woven

Angular as a twig into the fabulous

Rug or brocade with crowns and camels,

Leopards and rosettes,

All riding the vegetable wave of the street

From the John Flock Mortuary Home

Down to the river.

It was a small place, and off the center,

But so much a place to itself, I felt

Like a young prince

Or aspirant squire. I knew that Ivanhoe

Was about race. The Saxons were Jews,

Or even Coloreds,

With their low-ceilinged, unbelievably

Sour-smelling houses down by the docks.

Everything was written

Or woven, ivory and pink and emerald—

Nothing was too ugly or petty or terrible

To be weighed in the immense

Silver scales of the dead: the looming

Balances set right onto the live, dangerous

Gray bark of the street.