Valley Green (Fragments)

Walking out in the storm’s tattoo

I saw in the night

Fitzgibbon, smoking by the

laundromat. The cloud he said

was sick and sweet as

burning sugar on

the altar in the house.

                        Let the city be a harpsichord

                       

                        Toccata and fugue

                        in Philadelphia, where

                        I went on like a left-eyed

                        stranger with a sidelong

                        ticking in the brain—whir

                        and wobble, catch and shudder.

Across the street in the late-emptied church,

look, Schwarzwalder at the pulpit,

speaking of the desert, of Horeb

where they studied God in fire

(A God as yet unbodied

A world not yet domestic)

“Comfort were no comfort

now, so I am come with fire

for the wound.”

Once more to home,

and see, here’s St-Etienne

in seat, book in mouth
(“It tastes so bitter—

very bitter, unless perhaps

it’s sweet”) and the

jackhammer heel playing paradiddle

on the floor.

Here is Tolstoy in his dotage,

pilgrim from the long-toothed

city, the sun-beat city, the

city in the air.

                        With these riot eyes

                       

to dazzle and deceive,

in you, by you, I

will get fire—I

will beget fire till

the soil of my soul runs thin.