If nestled is the right word,
then this is how I find you,
gathered in evening by the bridge,
collecting what’s fallen as does a bird.

A fire starts.
It makes you a curious figure,
half mortal,
half refusing this shape,

building a light against its future.
You speak of shadows—
there have been many sources to throw them:
a quick glimmer struck for warmth,

a lighted brand, something
to keep off the witless darkness,
something to arrange behind you
a shape—

It is time.
Add together all the glints and sparkles
shed from the normal routine
of the lighter’s flint every evening,

moving among the newspaper and scrapped wood
underneath the shopping cart used as a grill,
and the sigh and hiss of bonfires
beads your path.

Wafting, a small smoke buoys them,
dark hair spreading on current,
disappearing as each cinder in the fume
winks.

Speaking of time, old companion,
the river under the bridge also has thousands of separate streams.
The river also is fuel you span.
Constantly elsewhere, old star,

your fires have dimmed into glassine streets and are walked,
forged and bent slow and cold then held aloft—
Each of our wheels on the bridge, over you
casts off sparkles.

It is time to recross until memory
of the arc’s awash in cold welds—
You, refugee, have long let furies cool.
Rekindle that beacon!

It is time to melt the many traveled streets
with the whiskey-ardour of the poor,
to fan the regret of the meek.
Brush off the soot-caked sunflowers, hear the howling locomotives,

feed on the hiss of death,
death closing its house for the night, death
wiping down counters and mopping its floor,
death eating stones to grind with unrelenting tenderness
ourselves and our abandoned gas pumps, death;

in its gizzard, ride.
It is the time of stony anger;
it is the time of outrage misnamed justice,
of recrimination’s wheel of state, O refugee!

This done with torch
carelessly droop’d,
borne pretty, dangled as a bauble—

But wait,
I’ve confused us.

Myself has changed, too.


*


I have burned against the unknown
to build in it
the shape of the known; I have gelled
the strangeness of fission,
called it power. I have splashed
sticky into rice fields, jungle villages
the angelic napalm.
My flicker’s joined the many selves of me in song,
and yet to say them all me does not sound wrong.

None seem eager,
yet here they rush monuments
onto battle sites, here they travel,
feet pressing land you will name.

All the many shadows! Each a separate stream—
So gray.
Suppose now I speak of something else,
to someone, or something
like me, made of time, and of friends,
rimed, smoothed by crossings.

It is time.
Refugee, let your pulses of rage scorch and blister my chants.
Immigrant your work is again due.
Spirit smoke and disaster, come whistling through the woods.
Spirit of savage scenes, it is time to murder your brother.


*


Electric spirit of muttering voice—mutter no longer!
Arouse and beware! My death is in the house,
called forth by mutterings!
Called forth by those who refuse to rouse.

What will you say of us, in your stomach glowing?

What is the saddest sound?

Spirit, rouse!
We smolder in the sheaf. Travel us ocean to ocean;
dwindle with us in our husks, motors quenched.

We must let what dies die. Whisper it!
As it slips quietly into who we are.

And I’ve gotten carried away; I’ve said we.

Friend, it is me; I must
read us our death-bed vigil.
I must dictate one last statute to our loved ones; I must
kiss our lips as we approach the dimming ill-lit river’s mouth.

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