This one is called "From Palookaville."
It has a quotation from the movie Laura.
It is an epigraph, "death cancels all engagements."
A remark made by Clifton Webb in the movie.
"The midgets stand on giants who stand
on midgets in Palookaville.
That day of storm notwithstanding
and it still takes one on out to the farther reaches
where boys play and maids bay at the moon in my Palookaville,
where the stench of farts drenches outside irony
with the dust of snow where all is served up
right to blonde kids in history books on the Gothic outskirts,
where everything gets unraveled just right where you can see
a coincidence coming from miles down
the valley along the trestle when
the snow, the femurs, the cries demure and act unwise.
At a time when centers shatter in strict unison,
when doubt is in the call of the fox and the sunsets
are like weddings.
I came here of my own accord from Jakarta.
I'm as old as you are and dare to say so.
But the following liaison spat out like miles of thread
are the lining of time's one easy lesson,
the shocks deep and narrow like crevasses dog teams
fly over over and around, aiming no way to please.
And it does in the arrested quickness of the visit, task.
But even life is the least bit pejorative.
But not the costumes, the calendar,
the trivia, the painted trappings to come undone
and your embrace and that's the word.
You were sent for and that is all.
No word on why some became the anvil,
and from here all it runs is dust or consommé.
There was fear smeared again on the walk.
And for two consecutive days we got out on it.
It's pretty safe so far.
On the fifth day a bank fails.
There are great falls and iodine in the little house.
It smells more like an accord this time.
And then there were birds you know too soft this time
for much of an answer.
And they came were there under steel arcades.
The night brings its business along,
stalls as though a feint saved the day one other time.
And now it's horses all around for anybody
that thinks they've got a contusion or a monopoly.
Surely it was warm faces all around.
The accents are distant as bells in that other hometown.
The stories often gory, tell why please
the accents in your own personal vignette
came up without a number and no one explained the cause.
A dim musical and some small room
folded under netting as though the crows stood by
to watch under the felt cushion something impolite zoomed.
It was suggested that we all carry away our traces
that we dispose of them thoughtfully so as not
to leave any bones of an argument
around for others mauling traces in bushes.
Black ones riding with white snow,
a pure defined drop of atheism.
And it arches out too wide to near the circumference
of the pier too much to say for what
an old man did on a recent day.
And what if it comes round on a recent day and what if we
all did.
And who shoved the pace of the thermometer.
On an outing who shamed the toaster.
Who is to say."