Fire: The People

Toplight hammered down by shadowless noon,

A palindrome of midnight, retrograde

From last month’s solstice in smoke and flame,

In molten glares from chrome or glass. I feel

Fever from the cars I pass, delirium

Trembling out from the radiators.

The dog-day romance seems to be physical,

As young free lances come into their own,

Sunbrowned, imperial in few clothes,

Heat-struck adulthood a subject to youth

And fitful as traffic, the mind pure jumble

But for that secret overriding voice

Advising and persuading at each crossroads;

The struggle toward freedom to forge a day.

Smoke; flame; oiled, gray-brown air.

Jackhammers and first gear on the avenues;

Stuntmen driving taxicabs; patient, blue,

Hippo aggressiveness of a bus, nudging

Aside the sedans. And the peculiar

Fascination of a row of workshops—

The dark interiors with skylight sunstripes;

A figure walking in slow motion among

Pistons; rough justice of a die cutter;

A helmeted diver, wielding acetylene,

Crouched over some work of sunken treasure

That sparkles gold at a probe from his torch . . . .

Seismic shocks interrupt this dream—a stampede

Of transports flat out to make the light,

Mack truck, Diamond Reo, a nameless tanker,

IT International, a Seatrain destined

For the Port Authority docks—one more

Corrugated block to pile on the rest,

Red, green, gray, and blue, waiting for a ship

In the Grancolombiana line . . . .

The seagoing city radiates invisibly

Over the world, a documentary sublime.

Lunch hour, even the foods are fast, potluck

In the melting pot: the Italian girl

With a carton of chicken; Puerto Rican folding

A pizza; the black woman with an egg roll;

A crop-headed secretary in round,

Metal spectacles eats plain yogurt (she’s

Already mantis thin) and devours glamour

Mags . . . . Our crowd scene, a moving fresco:

But is it really there? The adversary

Today is named Random. How capture all this

Without being taken captive in turn,

Install it as something more than backdrop,

As a necessity, not a sundry?

Suppose just an awareness of the way

Living details might be felt as vision

Is vision, full, all there ever was—this

Instant palindromic noon, the joined hands

Of the clock, end and beginning . . . . Surely

The first to consider imagining stars

Constellations had already done as much,

Just by making some brilliant connections;

Mind crowned itself in a round of leaps from point

To point across the empty stage of night . . . .

* * * * *

Now as a pigeon banks, descends, hovers,

And drops on asphalt with back-thrust wings,

Comes a desire to be lifted in the balance,

Rise to some highest point and then be met

By a fierce new light haloing lashes shatter

Into spears of aurora, naked eye become

Prismatic at last and given to see in kind

All the transformed inhabitants forever go

About their errands, on a new scale: the rainbow

Is the emblem for this moment filtering through

The body’s meshwork nerves, and a heartbeat impulse

All around puts troops of feet in step with music,

Persistent, availing, that disregards the frayed

Years, vagaries, downfall among trash, accident,

Loss; or because it knows these rushes upward

On something like heartbreak into the only sky,

Air aspirant with fractioned voices, feverfew

Of the sensed illusion, higher ground, progressions

Sounded in the spheres—so each step takes them further,

Sceptered, into daytime, saluting the outcome.

There is a fire that surpasses the known burning,

Its phoenix center a couple that must be there,

Blast furnace, dynamo, engendering a city,

Phosphor spines that bend and meet to weld, to fuse

As a divining rod—sluicings, spillway, braid,

Chorded basses that set myriad threads afire,

Newborn limbs and reach of the proven tendon now

Let go into empowered brilliance, rayed showers,

The garden regained. In this light the place appears:

Hands that rise or fall, muted gestures of welcome

And good-bye, face that turns and comes forward to claim

A smile latent in the afternoon air, vague crowds

Falling down streets without character toward

An offered covenant—love that gives them each a name.

Source: Poetry (July 1977)