Do-Right Man

North mill towns so big so hard to die however did.
My ma still pensions their parliament of graves and I do
the right thing. I'm told I fit, strong face, keep fit, but class
is bone-bred, guess. So school me to bed: bet
you bounce. I'll do the right thing and you do you,
you know? For the scene I flip the script, picture
me back on the block as a mode of time travel, theatrics
of Tennyson's Camelot, that crib meant to metric
heaven, therefore never built at all and therefore built
forever, from which the knight sets forth, the hero
my kid believes in at turns and O I swear I do
turn. Equally possible: her love, how the wool light
draws over Hudson heaven, blank as Mordred's shield,
and night means naught, not dead. I populate it
with Breughel's version of The Man Who Fell to Earth
when she denies I loved her mother like a little
sister, and I dream I am the description
I give of the rare old times, the mill town upriver, left
nosebleed corner on the Master's canvas, safe berth.
What to do with the galleons, slipping like wooden shoes
from some subliminal goal, no crew to care. And annulment.
That. Ask the wax man washing himself of his wings
or lawnmen, pacing their dull incisions in the foreshore,
who bow their heads to the rut and do-right, do. Right?

Hudson Line

Hiving in blear, we clutched a borough hem
through the rabble glove we were; near-living

estuaries, furrowed with scull wake, strove,
one on another, as their spit whorled breath

through the gloom pool, its caved crown, and I,
rapt to the curio birth of the bared once world,

thought to dip my toe in its genesis gap,
then more, and all, until I’d be annulled to throe

and bawls, first cruces of the comic turn
to life for which some author tied my helix

with a tongue, or none. Now northbound comes
and we fatten the hole of its silver bone.

Sleeping, I dream I shuttle through a hissing reed
alone, while platform swarms, roosting on scarp,

gawk crewed hulls, rowers fixing each rib
to the costume sternum, hearts in half-life: mud,

armored in smooth stones, clambers our strand
from fountainhead, drying its face on the noose roots

until it is I as all, is grit on the rails and glad.