Fourth of July

I. The View from Brooklyn

We tenants ascend in tune tonight
coughing and laughing, squeaking and scuffing
round around stairwells, always rising

to congregate and murmur high aloft,
stubbly silhouettes on rooftops
that await the spectacle of fires’ start.

Nine o’clock. Night has dragged out her notions
pinned up her stars, embroidered the city’s outline,
smoothed out the ebon set of her threads.

And beneath her slip, two thighs of water
the thickset Hudson, the pale East river
on them, the scows that suspend her garters.


II. The Exaltations of Fire

We hear a tssss—initial hiss and crack:
watch flickering flare, white which breaks
in inverse of normal light and thunder.

Nor cower, but climb to vigor and fury:
blue and gold showers, scarlet flurry
silver spatter, oohs and ahhs accompany

apprehending each species of sizzle and spark
flames within flames, the patterning stark
till retina prickles with punctuation marks.

Burn, out of blackness, is becoming:
is feeling, is making, alike by such blazing-
the raking of substance from nowhere.

And our powers are more than mere delight
imagining themselves so radiant
that by such imaginings, they’re able to create.


III. The Tribune of Works

On and on their sudden, dashing ambient:
through freewheeling and fervid tumult
to forms that in time begin to repeat

Each of them fades, as if sunk in a well,
having lived to the last, consuming themselves
made to witness their own going still.

Now the littered light of latecoming squadrons
illumes a spreading roil of smoke and plume
obscuring the crests of Manhattan.

Works too much themselves to be charged as metaphors,
shimmers shorn of death and nightmare:
it is enough that they lived and once were

nor terror, nor the ignorant repetition
nor the vitiated innocence, again and again
only this—truncated, cut short of their vision

till it whelms old scars of sad’s propinquity
and overlays the tall, trumpeting finale
like a briar crown: crimson and bloody.