You Got a Song, Man

for Robert Creeley (1926—2005) You told me the son of Acton’s town nurse would never cross the border into Concord, where the Revolution left great houses standing on Main Street. Yet we crossed into Concord, walking through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to greet Thoreau, his stone stamped with the word Henry jutting like a gray thumbnail down the path from Emerson and his boulder of granite. We remembered Henry’s night in jail, refusing tax for the Mexican War, and I could see you hunched with him, loaning Henry a cigarette, explaining the perpetual wink of your eye lost after the windshield burst in your boyhood face. When Emerson arrived to ask what you and Henry were doing in there, you would say: You got a song, man, sing it. You got a bell, man, ring it.