3399. CANTILEVERED CAVALRY

CANTILEVERED CAVALRY

How can I make lightness from your damned and heavy

presence; crossing out words on paper, eliciting no response

at all from crowds of hundreds with ears and eyes. I look around

me, sometimes just to check that there's not some hateful yet

marvelous bird of prey about to swoop down onto my head.

I miss the heat and the warmth of early summer mornings.

I have nowhere any longer to sit in the cold  -  pre-dawn and

all its pretty lights are nothing against the frigid air. And the

brightness I'm waiting for takes way too long to arrive.

The rightness I'm waiting for takes way too long to come.

-

I'm walking the planks of an old railroad bridge.

Abandoned now, and forgotten, it goes nowhere at all.

There hasn't been a train here for decades. All the old

sheds are hollow and zero and fallen and crumbled.

High, high above my head, and high above this soft

and marshy ground as well, the New Jersey Turnpike

roars. It roars with all its stupid people passing, going

as swift as their shit will take them, past the old rocks

of Laurel Hill, now mostly gone as well, blown apart

by dynamite and road-builders intent upon destruction.

-

A long, long time ago, atop that pile of rock, there was an

asylum, a crazy house, a sanitarium  -  whatever cheating

words they use to describe such places. Nothing was left,

for years, except a very tall and skinny, brick chimney.

The old graves were moved, and the charnel house too

became merely myth  -  some nasty old Hackensack

Meadow punchline, pig-farm joke, marshland metaphor:

'The crazy dead died crazy, until they were not any more.'

-

We moved them all, and took them away,

we moved them all away. (How could we

make likeness from their damned and

heavy presence? The rightness I'm

waiting for takes way too long to come).