“Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and
the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east….
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence,
others will see them….
From: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”—Walt Whitman
That a white rooster would crow at news of peace and war
That the awaited, Tiny People would never come to sit above us
in their pretend, dimly lit boxes
That an enraged lion with a head would roar in Latin, “Ars, Ars”
That a white-robed, bright Columbia was Mother-Virgin to the Jews
That Paramount announced that we too would walk high up in summer snow
on a summit somewhere
That RKO was the emitter of all sights, sounds and thoughts electrical,
close and remote
That angels flew with seraphim, and cupids flew with angels
and seraphim
That Rococco was Moorish, and Moorish was Baroque,
Doric, Art-Deco and Augustan
That a hand would slip as slowly over a shoulder, as the Eurasian plate does slip in increments beneath the North American
That our body would lean as slowly into another’s as a tower at Pisa
does tilt over The Field of Miracles, and ever closer towards the Ligurian Sea
That a matron would be a derivation of the Latin—matrona; mater
That a matron would be a “dignified woman of mature age and established social position”
That a matron would be a “wardress in a public institution, such as a hospital
or a prison”
That a matron would be “a female animal kept for breeding”
That a matron would be a short and robust lighthouse with a gold bouffant,
a face in clown-white, and fleshy, carmine lips with an overbite of horseteeth
That a matron’s wandering beam would warn us away from rocks, shoals and shallows,
and other limits of the sea
That when the plates would yield at last; when the tower would fall
onto the Field of Miracles, the at-last kiss would be as much a mystery
as the warm, wet touch of a fish’s lips in the deepest deep
That what would be pulled down would be raised up
That the bare walls, their scrawls and wounds exposed to the dry, dumb sun,
would be healed
That on a marqee, words and lights of all colors would cease to blink
That they would blink again in all their colors and in their sequences of colors.