The Ash Bringer

bleeding arterial tail lights across gray water

and its blue heart. Under Lemon Hill,

grunts from Boathouse Row, woodshop clunks,

young men’s voices too loud for a day

exhaling into starless skies, bad boys

after keg night, hungover, push long sculls

into the water and slice its marcelled run,

a marbled peacock wake behind each stroke

and coxswain counting that muscled steadiness

past the Water Works, Spring Garden Street Bridge

then Girard Avenue Bridge, where on the bank

Eakins sketches Max Schmitt in a single scull,

his light like this, tinfoil blue, where the crews sweat off

last night’s lost time but won’t row too far north

to river canals, Manayunk Reach, its towpath,

mules and barges and anthracite from Point Carbon

to feed stoves and Bessemers in Harrisburg, Pittsburgh . . .

Downriver, behind the boats and finny tracks:

League Island, where cheats and pimply teens parked

and tricked fingers through nipple hairs, satiny tufts,

the shut-down Navy Yard, once staggering shore leave

for so many thousands dead, how many more since,

in the rivers, of the rivers, like the girl

at a bend near the Museum gazebo: she tips

a throe of ashes from a brassy urn,

kneeling, not pious, just there, slanting her head

as if to speak to the passing, do it right,

shrug fine ores into the river—it takes so long

to cast away so little left of kin or friend

to Schuylkill, Delaware, Chesapeake, Atlantic,