Fire: The People

Toplight hammered down by shadowless noon, A palindrome of midnight, retrograde From last month’s solstice in smoke and flame, In molten glares from chrome or glass. I feel Fever from the cars I pass, delirium Trembling out from the radiators. The dog-day romance seems to be physical, As young free lances come into their own, Sunbrowned, imperial in few clothes, Heat-struck adulthood a subject to youth And fitful as traffic, the mind pure jumble But for that secret overriding voice Advising and persuading at each crossroads; The struggle toward freedom to forge a day. Smoke; flame; oiled, gray-brown air. Jackhammers and first gear on the avenues; Stuntmen driving taxicabs; patient, blue, Hippo aggressiveness of a bus, nudging Aside the sedans. And the peculiar Fascination of a row of workshops— The dark interiors with skylight sunstripes; A figure walking in slow motion among Pistons; rough justice of a die cutter; A helmeted diver, wielding acetylene, Crouched over some work of sunken treasure That sparkles gold at a probe from his torch . . . . Seismic shocks interrupt this dream—a stampede Of transports flat out to make the light, Mack truck, Diamond Reo, a nameless tanker, IT International, a Seatrain destined For the Port Authority docks—one more Corrugated block to pile on the rest, Red, green, gray, and blue, waiting for a ship In the Grancolombiana line . . . . The seagoing city radiates invisibly Over the world, a documentary sublime. Lunch hour, even the foods are fast, potluck In the melting pot: the Italian girl With a carton of chicken; Puerto Rican folding A pizza; the black woman with an egg roll; A crop-headed secretary in round, Metal spectacles eats plain yogurt (she’s Already mantis thin) and devours glamour Mags . . . . Our crowd scene, a moving fresco: But is it really there? The adversary Today is named Random. How capture all this Without being taken captive in turn, Install it as something more than backdrop, As a necessity, not a sundry? Suppose just an awareness of the way Living details might be felt as vision Is vision, full, all there ever was—this Instant palindromic noon, the joined hands Of the clock, end and beginning . . . . Surely The first to consider imagining stars Constellations had already done as much, Just by making some brilliant connections; Mind crowned itself in a round of leaps from point To point across the empty stage of night . . . . * * * * * Now as a pigeon banks, descends, hovers, And drops on asphalt with back-thrust wings, Comes a desire to be lifted in the balance, Rise to some highest point and then be met By a fierce new light haloing lashes shatter Into spears of aurora, naked eye become Prismatic at last and given to see in kind All the transformed inhabitants forever go About their errands, on a new scale: the rainbow Is the emblem for this moment filtering through The body’s meshwork nerves, and a heartbeat impulse All around puts troops of feet in step with music, Persistent, availing, that disregards the frayed Years, vagaries, downfall among trash, accident, Loss; or because it knows these rushes upward On something like heartbreak into the only sky, Air aspirant with fractioned voices, feverfew Of the sensed illusion, higher ground, progressions Sounded in the spheres—so each step takes them further, Sceptered, into daytime, saluting the outcome. There is a fire that surpasses the known burning, Its phoenix center a couple that must be there, Blast furnace, dynamo, engendering a city, Phosphor spines that bend and meet to weld, to fuse As a divining rod—sluicings, spillway, braid, Chorded basses that set myriad threads afire, Newborn limbs and reach of the proven tendon now Let go into empowered brilliance, rayed showers, The garden regained. In this light the place appears: Hands that rise or fall, muted gestures of welcome And good-bye, face that turns and comes forward to claim A smile latent in the afternoon air, vague crowds Falling down streets without character toward An offered covenant—love that gives them each a name.