|
|
You Got a Song, Man
For Robert Creeley (1926-2005)
- You told me the son
of Acton’s town nurse
- would never cross
the border
- into Concord, where
the Revolution
- left great houses
standing on Main Street.
- Yet we crossed into
Concord, walking
- through Sleepy
Hollow Cemetery
- to greet Thoreau,
his stone
- stamped with the
word Henry
- jutting like a gray
thumbnail
- down the path from
Emerson
- and his boulder of
granite.
- We remembered
Henry’s night in jail,
- refusing tax for
the Mexican War,
- and I could see you
hunched with him,
- loaning Henry a
cigarette, explaining
- the perpetual wink
of your eye
- lost after the
windshield
- burst in your
boyhood face.
- When Emerson
arrived
- to ask what you and
Henry
- were doing in
there, you would say:
- You got a song,
man, sing it.
- You got a bell,
man, ring it.
-
- You hurried off to
Henry in his cell
- before the trees
could bring their flowers
- back to Sleepy
Hollow.
- You sent your last
letter months ago
- about the poems you
could not write,
- no words to sing
when the president swears
- that God breathes
the psalms of armies in his ear,
- and flags twirl by
the millions
- to fascinate us
like dogs at the dinner table.
- You apologized for
what you could not say,
- as if the words
were missing teeth
- you searched for
with your tongue,
- and then a poem
flashed across the page,
- breaking news of
music interrupting news of war:
- You got a song,
man, sing it.
- You got a bell,
man, ring it.
-
- Today you died two
thousand miles from Sleepy Hollow,
- somewhere near the
border with Mexico, the territory
- Thoreau wandered
only in jailhouse sleep.
-
- Your lungs folded
their wings in a land of drought
- and barbed wire,
boxcars swaying intoxicated at 4 AM
- and unexplained
lights hovering in the desert.
- You said:
There’s a lot of places out there, friend,
- so you would go,
smuggling a suitcase of words
- across every border
carved by the heel
- of mapmakers or
conquerors, because
- you had an
all-night conversation with the world,
- hearing the beat of
unsung poems in every voice,
- visiting the
haunted rooms in every face.
- Drive,
you said, because poets must
- bring the news to
the next town:
- You got a song,
man, sing it.
- You got a bell,
man, ring it.
from
The Republic of Poetry |
|
