I. PORTRAIT OF SMOKE

Penn's GREENE COUNTRIE TOWN uncurled a shadow in the 19th century,
that descended over gridiron like black shroud,
& darkened parlors with the predatory fog prosperity
as familiar as the ornate plot in a Dicken's novel.
The city grieved an incurable lung (TB in that time), trolleys
clanged the days' despair of which workers in cotton mills, & foundries
shook heads in disbelief, the unfolding theme caking on ashen faces.
Above mantels in gilted frames; tasseled carriages, silk bonnets,
linen parasols echoing the silence of Victorian evil,
the shade soldered to new empires as steam-engines
hissed & brought this century's opening chapter to a creeping halt.
Step onto a platform in our own time, the city's a Parthenon,
a ruin that makes great literature of ghostly houses,
whose hulking skin is the enduring chill of the western wind.
Stare back down cobbled alleys that haze into clopping horses,
wrought-iron railings, to grand boulevards that make a fiction
of suffering; then return to this century of housing-projects,
to man-high weeds blooming the barren canvasses of your vacant lots.

II. PORTRAIT OF HARDROCK

You are almost invisible in all this plain decay.
Children's laughter echoing in arcs of hydrant waterspray
knots the heart; those black bathers like Cezanne's
will soon petrify to silence. You walk with all your organs
below a chorus or electric lines stitching tenement
to tenement & feel every humming rowhome
you pass crumble to a gutted relic; this one exposing
a nude staircase, that one a second-floor ceiling
where hangs a lightbulb like the chipped soul suspended
from a thread of nerves. You have never pretended
this was paradise, nor made a country of your ghetto,
only that the casket is as old a vessel as the human shadow
& the eye wants other stones to worship.
The sun dreams the crowns of trees behind skyscrapers.
Here, the heart is its own light; a pigeon's gurgle once rose
from earth. The dead are muraled from POLAROIDS & grin brick-faced
at the living on street-corners like billboards of caution,
seeming to utter, "No more. Turn your ruins to gardens."

III. THE RESURRECTION

Go now, give back yourself to your breath, to your own beating.
Go, pace yourself from one foot to the next as if savoring
every minute in your book of hours; pause at each step
then climb to this temple, to what endures as the only meaning.
There is still time left to stand beside your neighbor,
to curse each other's dead pores, to moan the painter's
fragrant vision, to bend a little towards the wall, stepping back
rocking nonetheless on your toes & heels, pondering
the bend of wood, whispering to each other debating
the history of light, & the function of paint,
& the power of tropes, & what persists & what subsides,
leaning in, listening to divergent breathers & praising each other
for returning to the BURGHERS, & the SHAKERS & THE CUBISTS,
for visiting the HOUSE OF TEA, the COAT OF STEEL the GOD OF PORCELAIN,
for passing another Sunday through those honeyed columns,
& those liquid pennies, for sneezing in those treasured galleries,
ready to face other ruins, ready to give back yourself
to your breath, ready to drum out your own beating.