Don't read Rilke's notebooks of the vagabonds of Versailles
to cross the bridge from Brooklyn: don't do Hart Crane's
winsome bleeding river Styx; the world is too much flax
from Curacao's sweatshops back in Greenpoint. We purvey
Wigstock with a mother-in-law and ferret, on the day of the riots
in Tompkins Park, taking the Circle Line round museum mile
while Bill Clinton idles at a railway font where Lincoln spoke.
Don't make your twins backstroke Corlears Hook at the ebb,
when a Swiss au pair's deboned by a guy called Chicken Freak.
Thursdays, after supper in Grace Church shelter, vet Bernard
consoles the sick with balm of celery oil or extract sassafrass.
He keeps shutting off television Baywatch, but the men,
tired from circling St. Peter's Square, want basketball and babes:
some of the eight-year leg wounds stanch and bleed and stink.
Don't think that the cardboard shacks or neatly-knotted socks
are anything but prodding the loss of memory towards light:
I'm already in bed with a biography of Fahrenheit, by silent
James, merchant marine, who sings out Arabic or Ethiopian,
the catarrh in the air the only lullaby tonight, where wheezing
sifts to baby's breath, where homeless men quell loneliness
in fresh sheets on army cots and grope our ways towards sleep.

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