woodenly crystallized, and where two fireflies
are only lost.
Hear nothing but a train that goes, must go, by like tension,
nothing.
And wait:
maybe even now these minutes' host
emerges, some relaxed uncondescending stranger,
a soul's release.
And while the fireflies
are failing to illuminate these nightmare trees
might they not mean his green gay eyes.
W. M. Meredith, Jr.
A VIEW OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE
The growing need to be moving around it to see it,
To prevent its freezing, as with sculpture and metaphor,
Finds now skeins, now strokes of the sun in a dark
Crucifixion etching, until you end by caring
What the man's name was who made it,
The way old people care about names, and are
Forever seeing resemblances to people now dead
Of stone and the two metals drawn out so
That at every time of day
They speak out of strong resemblances, as:
Wings whirring so that you see only where
Their strokes finish, or: spokes of dissynchronous wheels
Whose pictures and poems should accurately be signed
With the engineer's name, whatever he meant;
These are called
Tines inflicting a river, justly,
And, thinking how the cables owe each something
To the horizontal and something to the vertical,
A graph of the odds against
Anyone man's producing a masterpiece
