You know, many poems are occasioned by,
or spring out of events, things which the poems don't directly
talk about, or in fact don't seem to have really that
much to do with.
I read this poem partly because the occasion
was the announcement that David Dellinger, and Jerry Rubin,
and Hoffman, and all those cats were being
brought to trial in Chicago.
And everybody had a pretty good idea
of what was going to happen, but we really had no idea.
"Soon the ministers will be putting
on their expensive overcoats.
The wing dips over the sunlit city,
covering the crumbling walls.
One succumbs to the fog late at night.
It seems the earth can open at any moment, jump over the fence
to a waiting car.
Tonight is like walking on ice, slippery as a cunt.
It comes, a secret lover crucified on the crosshairs.
The leaves lit up by the rising smoke.
Foretelling the future is one of our heavy industries."