Along this puny bayside road,
where the concrete apartmental beasts rise up
in their becastled storied crenellations,
mortared Krishnas with a thousand glassy eyes
facing the strayed armies of the Atlantic,
like a hallucinogenic great and graying cloud,
the razor tips of icy waves throwing their battalion
against the shiftless sand and boarded-up cowerings
of sidewalk shops—we’ve had enough, and stop
in this end-stopped city, trapped by the furious waters
of both sky and antipode, like a frozen summer fly
whose deadwood wings have shuttered
into momentary death.
Out beneath the frigid needles of the downpour’s core,
tiny speakers tied to pavement posts are playing
Sunday hits to keep one’s hope alive. We walk into
a corner’s mansion of concessional normality,
the Concord Point, where some have come to shut
their tents of lonely tensions under an inlaid golden
ceiling of submerged wants and stepped-down craves,
a temporary pool of agreeable lassitude, a café
of half-bidden, hidden, hearts.
A placard hangs on the entrance to a backdoor sanctum
of antiquities on which the philosopher John Wayne
proclaims in apothegmic wisdom that life is tough—
but even tougher for the stupid—a hard, adrenaline
truth scattered on burnt blocks for us to contemplate
while sipping from assorted brews of black
and brown and green. We smile and sip away
and look around this emporium of monochromes
so near the Gothic hospital tower rising over houses
in the mist. The addiction center must be nearby too
for those who have lost the good of the intellect,
a harbor from which no one wants to sail except
the intellect itself, flummoxed down to its
hallucinatory frontal lobe like a gored melon
with a clown-striped head.
There must have been a last summer here
in purplish-blue and indigo heat when large-winged
cardboard birds swept from the intermittent pressure
of the sky as if to savor the all-too-human flesh
of roving denizens in their perpetually
motioned liberty across this haven
of causation’s ratcheting—if I look closely
I can see the quiet agitation ready to break out
into its many variants of strain and din
like a great rough snake that slithers
through the gravelly air—
fear that dumbs us in the wintry dark,
fear that stricts the pulleys in the blood,
fear that makes the water creak and dry up in our eyes—
until we swoon beneath the shipless waters
of the dock, the harbor’s harbinger of wakeful sun
squeezing through the wan knotholes of our sight
where all shall be the same again before this tour,
a single filament turning us toward the graceful ray
of highway winding out while ancient creatures prowl
behind our thinning tears and tearings on all sides,
leaving no traces in the sand, too soon for children’s
rides and silhouettes and people pressing their third eye
into the pier planks’ peepholes to the waves below.
We order more coffee from the shades
behind the register, masking new inquietudes,
old despairs, our backs toward the squall
of casts and clouds, waiving and saving
what we can of the day’s thin winter light.