After a Saturday Night with Lady Day and Hart Crane
and Mrs. Brady's daughter, he spends a Sunday
morning in the park, alone.
because an Irish girl
is a rocket full of clover with a red fuse
looking for a match in a poet's pocket,
I sit here on a green bench in the park
with a cardboard cup of smoke and coffee,
watching the leaves in the tallhappy trees
shiver and bustle with busybird noises.
from the not much distance of the corner
I can hear the brass ring of kid-dizzy voices
riding dragons and lions and up 'n down horsesand all the time,
on the first floor of the Museum of Natural History
between a stern stuffed tiger with two big teeth
and the lower jaw of a Pleistocene whale,
the oblivious Foucault Pendulum,
suspended and swinging from a 45-foot aluminum line,
demonstrates, for sunday citizens,
the smart rotation of the earth's axis
by knocking over, every fifteen minutes,
another small peg.(previously published in the Evergreen Review)