The beaux-art bas-relief in Tompkins Park commemorates the burning
of the General Slocum; I squint to squirrel out dates--MCMIV--
a year there isn't any war, anywhere on Earth. But this is Panama
at home: the enemy is negligence. East River, workers' Sunday
fete of women and children from St. Mark's Church, the boat
hove to near Hell Gate and spontaneously alit, like tippet tulle
on fire when sun refracts off broken glass. In my dream
the steamer always sloughs up past Rikers before imploding
into ash--baskets of roulade, kegs of stout, ten Kasseler hams
unglue in stokers' hots across bowsprit into midships,
babies plunging in life vests into the still-cold churnings
of sound-into-river, sinking like stones to the bottom
of the plunge. From the photo you can't hear screams
from in or outside the scarlet fever hospitals, nor along
Longfellow Ave., across the isthmus one boy swims to
to take the brand-new IRT down south to spread news:
rickets, polio, jaundice--now this. All of Little Germany
in black. The sobs from the few surviving mothers
will keep me up another seven centuries, till ghosts
of the wreck merge upwards out of the kill and hover
here, then rise, to where they can try to find some peace.