This next poem is called "The Work."
It's the last poem in this book.
Imagine living very depressed in New York City in winter,
as I did.
"Ice burning off the river in the crystal air, souls lifting.
Rapture, as you want to see it, lifting and then vanishing
in crowds as if a door is being shut.
As if a door is being shut, though there
are evermore crowds of souls waiting
to rise above the glass and steel towers
erect above the river.
Their deserted floors lit and their elevators
ready for the nothing that will show up all day.
The antenna lights on top of them, red and twinkling,
city hard as stars.
You're in it-- in the hardness and vapors,
in the unbreakable, the ungraspable.
Hurrying against the light, truck horn blaring,
bearing down, and fading down the desolate Sunday Avenue.
6 o'clock in the City of Hidden Dragons,
exhaling the remnants of their hidden fires
through the rotting piers and ice edged grates, smoldering
beneath the river and under the streets, in the lungs,
yes, of you.
The sun edges, reluctant, to the rim of the Eastern shore.
You walk and breathe, watch your soul lifting.
The cherubs, chipped and worn at the lintels, the gargoyles
at the cornices, the saints on the dashboard of the taxi
idling at the light--
idling at the light.
Idling at the curb of the street where
the bodies are tucked into newspaper corners and tarp
covered stoops, their boxes and bags and sleeping shadows
dusted with a thin coating of ice.
14 degrees and the mercury dropping.
14 degrees and the mercury lifting up on his icy wings,
up and up past the rusted steel railings of the fire escapes,
all the six flights, to a rocking gap between the window
and the frame of your box apartment
and slipping soundlessly in.
What will he take, God of Thieves?
What will he fix?
The deuces.
Have you felt him perched at the foot of your bed
as you tossed, sleepless and dream plagued, as you stood
and groped down your ill-lit stairs
pushing open the heavy locked door
and hurried into the knifing air.
Passed the bodies asleep in the vapors obscuring
the padlocked stores and vacant lots, to stop
transfixed at the steaming river,
its slow exhalation of souls.
So cold, the red tips of your fingers,
the little white crystals at work in your blood.
Your gloveless hands jammed into your pockets
as you watched the sun come cold and turned back
reluctant and trudged up the steep flights
and turned the key in the lock and stepped in.
This is it--
America.
You put the water on the pot in the pot.
This is it-- your century.
You put the match to the stove.
You can feel it, the city, constant around you
as you put the dark tea in the cup.
What is the river?
What are the souls to the engine industry grinding about you,
to the tightening weave of the electronic strings in which
love and money and science are speeding, to the ghost bodies
iced on this frozen stairwells.
What are they-- your river and souls.
Radiators hiss.
Droplets at the pot's rim bubble and vanish.
And what is this to your river and souls?
Tea now, drink it, little hearth in your hands.
Water and salt, my vessel, my loved one,
are making their marriage again.
To say I hurt--
to say the heavens are empty.
To say I hurt--
the heavens are empty.
The streets are empty.
Beer cans scatter, the click and tink of their tinny bells.
To say there is a Dark Age grasping for light
extending its bent hands back to the other one which
had striven and striven while this one doesn't even
know its strides.
And to say the sirens are advancing.
And to say it's 1999.
And to say my gas bill is late.
And to say there is no lover and to rise up to the stove
and pour the water in the cup, to watch the tea stain it
while Mercury opens his doctoring wings
and hovers at the edge of the ceiling, to cocoon you,
to give you a stage.
It is the work.
Sophia, Wisdom, Jewel, it is the work."