You would have to go down
into black earth like my father
gold light against shadow

I got this from a man on the street
in Richmond, circa 1964, who
offered me an easy job in his hotel

        As I ride my bicycle home from work at sunrise
a young fellow with an upturned collar asks me for my “spare change.”
He is friendly, as if we were classmates meeting in the schoolyard.

A soft whoosh, the sunset blaze
of straw on blackened stubble,
a thatch-deep, freshing

He licks the last chocolate ice cream
from the scabbed corners of his mouth.
Sitting in the sun on a step

Stars are tears falling with light inside.
In the moon, they say, is a sea of tears.
It is well known that the wind weeps.

For some of us the only way of knowing we are here at all, going
across and going down,
exquisitely temporal though at no point believable; fragile; tragic.

I stood by the river where the flesh of our world
Is swept it knows not where (but I knew)
And thought how one day the bottom land

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea

We begin every night ignorant,
two xenophobes called in from exile,
pleased to the point of buoyant.