That is where the coal ash is headed, not somewhere
but to you who are farther downstream
than me.

A cold rainy March morning came.
Two birds woke up and saw the sun
that comes up every morning

In the July hot smelly horse manure dust
out behind old man Mooney’s barn
that sits just at the outskirts of the town

Today is beautiful the birds singing
in the trees where they have landed or in the air when
they are going, the sun wrapping its fingers

Late in the century, Chaucer stretches
having just finished with his reckonings
in wool, checking them all against the chits

The poet sits quietly looking around.
Then galloping, galloping, galloping
out of his old age, into the sweet reply

These good New Yorkers bent low over books
deserve a Paradise of softer chairs
and sleep, their heads against that fringed and white

Through the veiled hush of the nut garden, God
was walking in the cool of the day; He
felt like talking again to a mortal

She feared hell, loved heaven, and the angel’s tooth
that gnaws away the flesh with temperance—
think of this woman, who was half a saint,

Crossing the land in a train, I passed through
the borderless townlets of sprawled New York
rising red brick out of nothing after