Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, RETURN TO MARSH STREET, by THOMAS MCGRATH


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

RETURN TO MARSH STREET, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Twice, now, I've gone back there, like a part-time ghost
Last Line: Bearable
Subject(s): Bohemians; Easter; Holidays; Los Angeles; The Resurrection


1.

Twice, now, I've gone back there, like a part-time ghost
To the wrecked houses and the blasted courts of the dream
Where the freeway is pushing through.
Snake country now.
Rats-run --
Bearable, bearable --
Winos' retreat and the midnight newfound lands --
Bearable, perfectly bearable --
Of hungering rich lovers under the troubling moon
Their condominium;
bowery close; momentary
kingdom come --
Wild country of love that exists before the concrete
Is poured.
Squatters there.
That's all
O.K. with me.

2.

First time I went there -- about a year ago come Monday --
I went hunting flowers: flowering bushes, flowering shrubs, flowering
Years-grown-over gardens: what was transportable.
What was transportable had been taken long away.
Among the detritus, rock-slides, confessions, emotional moraines --
Along the dream plazas and the alleys of the gone moon --
Some stragglers and wildlings: poppy, sorrel, nightblooming
Nothing.
And found finally my own garden -- where it had been --
A pissed-upon landscape now, full of joy-riding
Beer cans and condoms all love's used up these days
Empty wine bottles wrappers for synthetic bread
. . . . . .
Larkspur, lupin, lavender, lantana, linaria, lovage.
And the foxglove's furry thimble and the tiny chime of fuchsia
All gone.
The children's rooms have a roof of Nothing
And walls of the four wild winds.
And, in the rooms of the night,
The true foundation and threshing floor of love,
Are the scars of the rocking bed, and, on certain nights, the moon.
Unending landscape . . .
dry . . .
blind robins . . .

3.

Blind Robins, Blind Robins -- Fisherman, do you take Blind Robins
In the stony trough of the dry Los Angeles river?
No charmed run of alewives or swarming of holy mackerel
From the pentecostal cloud chambers of the sex-charged sea, no
Leaping salmon on the light-embroidered ladders of eternal redemption?
Damnation of blind robins . . .
bacalao . . .
dried cod, is that
Is that all you take on your dead-rod green-fishing Jonah,
Poor boy, mad clean crazy lad I pulled once from this river in
spate it is not
Bearable.

4.

Well, wait, then.
Observe.
Sky-writing pigeons, their . . .
Blue unanswerable documents of flight, their . . .
Unearthly attachments.
Observe:
these last poor flowers,
their light-shot promises,
That immortality, green signature of their blood . . .
. . . . . .
Now, instantly, the concrete comes: the freeway leaps over the dead
River and this once now twice-green moment into the astonished
Suburbs of the imaginary city petrified
Megalopolitan grief homesteads of lost angels anguish . . .

On this day nothing rises from the dead, the river
Dying, the dry flowers going under the mechanic stone . . .
Sirs!
Archaeologists! what will you find at that level of ancient light?
Poverty destroyed sweet hearts and houses once before Progress
His Engines
Put down a final roof on the wild kitchens of that older
Order.
These lovers long are fled into the storm.
The river is dry.
It is finally.
completely.
Bearable


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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