Wilmington, Delaware.
They've crumbled before they were ever
finished, these American cities, which
dreamed one day to be finished cities and pronounced good.
Architecturally speaking, the new world
turns cradles directly into graves.
For instance, Wilmington, Delaware.
As evocative of death as any dig or ruin,
more sad for never having been, more hideous like the cadaver
as opposed to the sleeping stone of the sarcophagus on top
of it.
34 years ago, hitchhiking north on Route 1,
I stopped for the night in Wilmington, Delaware.
I remember I met an old hobo that night
at the ferry landing.
I almost remember his name.
Now dead, of course.
I mean the ferry, but also the hobo.
No matter.
No matter, I say.
It's no matter.
His coat came down past those knees.
His pants went on over his shoes.
A suit plucked off a clothesline.
He taught me how to steal a hen so that the farmer's
dog wouldn't know.
How to come up on her and seize her by the neck,
and in one motion whirl her about in the air,
breaking the neck, of course, and twisting the wind pipe
closed, effectively shutting off any cry for help
she might want to utter.
Give, perhaps, is the idiom.
That doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter that we cooked a stolen hen
over a fire of branches by the Delaware Bay,
nor that with the squeamishness of the young,
I dismouthed the very raw parts the fire hadn't even
warmed into my hand and slipped them quietly
behind me into the seagoing waters of the Delaware Bay.
In the morning, the sun was out as I sailed north
on the ferry that's now gone.
I was 16.
Wilmington, Delaware was still on its way to becoming a city,
and already very far on its way to falling to ruin.