Life's not so bad
until just before morning
when I see a dark man
driving a black Cadillac
take a cigarette from his lips
and throw it out the window
watching it go all to pieces
all over the road.

The mist in the collard greens
is moving like an old woman
in dusty lingerie making sparks
with a *** where it lays tired
and the moon looks right odd
like an albino hawk in a dead
tree -  branches of solemnity
and worn out blue guitar strings -
while that old locomotive
of darkness  blows its steam
through my back porch screen.

Now I am tranquil-
ized with the low light
of a fairly good star
planted serenely
in my Atlantic
and out there where
a lonely gull cries
dipping a wing
to the sea singing
a sleepy lullaby
in a language that Vargas
and I know so well
so, goodnight my angels
tomorrow will bring us
something akin to
a new day we can say
in one voice, Hallelujah
I am alive.

This unnatural light
like the last summer
before the last winter
sends the grackles
into the cedars
rattling their wings
in the evergreens
making a sound like Ishmael
casting his bones
on the deck of Ahab's ship.

Do not look sadly
at days gone by
days below days
like a river
running under stars

do not listen to priests, the blues
or that bitter veteran fool
of some past war claiming to miss
a piece of his soul, his only disease
is the rotting of an *******

the poet that forgets
in remembrance of you
is a lunatic's left hand man
a gun in the hands of a fool

on Sundays he is the acolyte
of the moon, night following
other nights, the eyes of the blind
the stranger who  lusts after wives

his tool the bitter root of a persimmon tree
and every time he draws his pen
like a knife and drawls his soliloquy
I say forget him, let us drink again

for poets do not cut their fingers
at cheap joints like ******
toasting one another's death

they do not eat the cheese or hoard
the rich black bread of their poetry;
the true poet gives it kindly to the poor.

I saw a girl in a wheelchair on her porch
and wasps were swarming in the cornice

She had just washed her hair
taken it down and combed it

She could see
just like me

That one star under the rafter
shining like a knife in the creek

She was thin as the hereafter
and made me think

Of music singing to itself
like someone putting a violin in a case

And walking off with a stranger
to lie down and drink in the dark by the lake.