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Heavens and Earth

Chapter 18: 8:30 A. M. ON 32ND STREET
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About This Book

The collection assembles varied lyric and narrative poems that range from reworkings of classical myths to sharp urban vignettes and satirical sketches of modern life. Several longer pieces retell mythic episodes with vivid, imagistic language, while other poems observe city streets, public figures, and personal loss with concise reportage and elegiac restraint. Recurring concerns include desire, mortality, war, and social disorder, framed by a tension between heroic past and everyday present and rendered through formal experimentation and dramatic monologue.

8:30 A. M. ON 32ND STREET

The wind sniffed like a happy cat
At scuttling beetle-people,
The sunshine would have roused a flat
To try and be a steeple.
My breakfast in me warm and staunch,
Your letter in my pocket,
The world’s a coon that’s climbed a branch
And I am David Crockett.
Time hoards our lives with griping care
And barren is his bursary,
But he’ll make diamonds of the air
Upon one anniversary!
Five years ago I saw you first
And knew in every part
The flagrant and immortal thirst
Love salts into the heart.
Five years ago the Pleiad crew
Sang in their starry hive,
Because a miracle like you
Could dare to be alive!
Five years, and still, through earth’s degrees
You, like a pageant, pass;
Courageous as invading seas
And careless as the grass.
Pauper poets of rimes grown thin
Mutter their madhouse wrongs.
I have aeons to love you in,
Ages to make you songs!
Pour your rain on the bitter tree!
Harrow the soil with spears!
I shall grow you Felicity,
After a million years!
The street-signs winked like smiles at me,
The wind pawed by enchanted!
The sun swung high for all to see
I’d stop him if I wanted!