84. WRITING AS A PLACE TO LIVE

WRITING IS A PLACE TO LIVE
The places I've loved no longer exist.
All that I dreamed of is gone.
-
The most decided of moments has affected
all things - our pictures have changed with
that moment. The ruined cities of America:
Calumet City, when it was a mob town with
very public vice or that small place in Cleveland,
with its whisky and ice.
-
Certain places were always a clue - when we
understood the name of our quarry : the
grand ballrooms full of nakedness and a band.
Chicago, Baltimore and New York. Packed up
places with plenty of power.
-
The places I've loved no longer exist,
and all that I dreamed of is gone.
-
Those cantilevered bridges, arching faint pose,
lightly, over those darkened rivers. That winsome
sound - of the train leaving town. The smell of
the coal-house and the tractors - somehow re-seeding
the surface of the land. Everything, all at once,
a'jumble and crazy and perverse and wild.
Now, all this is over.
The world has gone mild.
-
...the places I've loved are all gone :
and all that I dreamed of no longer exists...

*for Jack Gilbert, at 80