I am stuck between Sweatro and Gingerman,
stuck out by the dumpsters, ****, and toothed butts,
scrubbing concrete for roaches, hands stung
out with brown shards of Michelob bottles
between shots and lines.

I am stuck in the batlamp, stuck in the felt,
stacked like quarters by the rail, waiting my turn
at the game, my turn at the trough,
hailing drinks like cabs, two fingered,
absolute and limed.

There was a girl there once,
square-shouldered, brass-railed
and flickering. There was an eye
to an eye, a mocked dissection - yes,
a cutting - a splendid humbled nothing.

Yes, those nights bled fast,
slumped down to Campeche,
burrowed into beans and red rice.
Yes, before the fogs wore off,
before the graystones went gray,
before the foilman don't like that,
out there in the dumpsters,
where I found a roach,
scarred my lip, spread glass,
spread lies and conjured a time
high in the **** of discard,
high in a nothing called mine.

My mother loved the dogwood blooms -
each spring a fresh crucifixion.
And when it flushed wild in the clearing,
where our new house stood,
on a stripped skull, quick to erode,
my mother would rush to the dogwood,
take each stained white blossom
in her hand and said "forgive, forgive."

She never went to church anymore,
never again touched her cold dead Mary,
never again begged favor or grace,
not after that first spring
bloomed dogwood,
not after the twisted
cursed and giving lumbers
first sprung upon her eyes -
a crucifixion, multiplied,
a hundred times, a hundred Aprils
on the limbs of a retribution.

At Irving and Sheridan, cabs, buses and cars bled with a scab of gray belch low in the gelid airs.  Above, a draught of light spilled out of the Redline, spilled lanky into the coffee of the night, filigree cream in the eye.  It was then that I saw her, strobed in amber as the train banged itself taut and fleeing.  I watched her decay, velvet down the platform stairs.  I stood gum on the sidewalk before ticked-out commands. Walk. Don't Walk. Walk. Stirring a light thick with the bitters of spent grease, she poured into the street and came toward me, longstriding.  It was then I saw her, tepid and far.  I no longer heard the flickering scrape of the El, nor did I smell the burnt hashbrowns of the New Crystal flickering day-old soup in neon and steam.  I heard only a vague exhausted wind, smelled only the lurid musk of Obsession and rot as she passed beyond the veil of my brim. It was there, at that moment, I walked Hopper for the first time. It was there, at Irving and Sheridan, I became an overcoat and a thin dime.

From some forgotten cache,
a bur oak, scrawny, stunted
humble and tawny, high
on the red sheer palisade,
twists the moon into shards
and shattered pearl.

Raked by the ever wind,
a bur oak -
cleaved into cloven rock
abhors this ****** moon -
its waning wandering wax -
such mockery of clinging.

Sprung from some forgotten cache,
a bur oak rails against it's own
stripped rippling arms,
as if to proclaim and rightly:
I, alone upon this rock,
hold the blackest gray squirrel -
that hoarding, heaving vermin -
to account on this crooked,
blighted night.

Black Aggie presides on the Druid Ridge,
taking children to her lap
that they may convene with bent-feathered
birds felled in her shadow.

And there on the Druid Ridge,
in the red eye of night she foots the grounds,
drags each from their slumbers,
calls forth to discuss the marrow.

Oft scorned and feared by black grasses
burned in her passing, stained by vandals
unfeigned hatred of grief, Aggie
remains for to harrow.

Cold, still, tormenting the Pikesville shroud
such that none could rest in the lime
of her stone-eye, such that none would test
the hand to reach into the pits of their loss,
to find each one a pulp for the barrow.

Mrs. Parr made us write letters
to the hammering man that lived
in the radiators of those cold
Beechfield elementary rooms.

He got a lot of mail that winter - '70 to '71,
and we scratched our gratitudes
on the four line papers, certain
to keep our ascenders and descenders
in time and in tune with the peals
of iron and steam.

It wasn't until '77 that I got a grip
on thermodynamics and realized
there was no man in the heat
of those cold Beechfield rooms,

No giving hand with a maul
to pound away the nails of frost
and loose the stiff knuckles
of a chattering hand.

But back in '71, when mercury
pressed against iron, too young
to formulate disbelief,
we gave our penciled thanks
to the hammering man
that once had wrought relief.

I was always adept at disappearance.
Just silt and gutterwash slipping off the ridge.
Brown water and runoff, thick chemistries
down to the trout streams, crisp, unmuddied.

Perhaps, though eroded by my passage,
shaped, however briefly by this greedy torrent,
heedless of the lumbers and rounding stone,
I hope for a simple clear to surface.

I am stilled by the rippling eyes of you,
these faces above a drowning.

These each and varied grains of you,
these flakes of skin and hair of you
remain, held close in this current,
oft rabid, oft flat and running,
knowing only one nature -
to keep on - to keep on -
to keep on to the tides.