Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE DROWNED MAN: DEATH BETWEEN TWO RIVERS, by THOMAS MCGRATH


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE DROWNED MAN: DEATH BETWEEN TWO RIVERS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Someone moves through the jungle
Last Line: Someone is born with the bright face of your brother
Subject(s): Death; Drowning; New York City; Dead, The; Manhattan; New York, New York; The Big Apple


1.

Someone moves through the jungle
Where the East Side rears its neo-Tammany escarpment
Over East River toward the city of the dead, toward Brooklyn;
Past the opulent stinks, the sinks and pits of corruption,
Where canned heat dreams are pregnant with rancid dragons --
Immaculate conceptions! --

Someone, someone is moving:
The feet go eastward, past the callow pimps
Pasted on door-ways and past the wise, new-minted
Eyes of the semi-virgins. Waters of Israel
Open in paths before him: the Leaning Man,
Comes out of Egypt.

By the waters of his captivity,
He leans on the river rail. The enchanted liner,
A breathing bird upon the water's breast,
Beats for the windy capes, the secret cities
Of the lush South. The river stinks. Behind him,
The towers of Babylon --

Altar of profane love,
Each marvelous marble phallus. On the walls
The handwriting winks in easy translations of neon.
Over him the bridge no one has written an ode to,
And northward the monstrous Tri-borough, seeking direction
Puts out its feelers:

A symbol of indecision
For the Leaning Man, the semi-vertical man,
Man by a river, looking to westward, knowing
The terrible land wherein the Lost Tribes dwell,
And, hatches closed against night, the known world
Slowly submerging.

He assumes vertical stature
Standing, as the deck lists under the lip of water
He looks toward the city, inventing impossible justice:
Recalls other cries, and decision matures, remembering
Metal of headlines masked as life preservers:
Dives from the railing.

The East River upbore him:
Two-thirds submerged in the riptides under the bridgeheads,
In a montage of oil-smear, rotten fruit and wreckage --
Christ! his poor face split like a seed-pod sowing
In the crucified night an improbable human anguish --
The face of my brother!

2.

Full fathom five the East Side lies;
The West Side lies five fathom under.
A slow sea-change in the drowned veins,
The unfortunate human condition creates its pitiful wonders:
Unlikely fear has deepened into gills
And cynic's scales -- armor against laughter;
The dearest nightmare is the dream of waking,
Waking to choke in the drowsy midnight waters:
The drowned eye builds in token its cheap ambiguous altars
In the Java Deeps of the Leaning Men, where the drunken small boat founders.

The little yachts of extended credit
Are lost where the naked rocks are lying
But the mighty slave-galleys of surplus value
Move on these human deeps, majestic, the black flag flying.
At dawn in Wall Street the gentle fishers
Dapple with nets the sunshot sound,
And all but the strangest swimmers are taken:
Between two rivers where my brother drowned --
In the waters of Manhattan, where he last went down,
Where the mad boy catches at his sunken moons and darkens the night with crying.

* * *

I heard them crying halfway up Delancy --
Poverty halleluiahs, neither private nor fancy.
Tell me, Stranger, who was lost,
Father, son or wholly ghost?

3.

No one has seen in the leaves, in the dark, crowding,
The immaculate mutinous bodies, or, shyly, the brutal
Inhuman faces of angels. Only of birds,
In the empty dark, the shameless voices puzzling
Some last year's song. The news is bad. Angels
Are scarce this year. A ghost perhaps? But no one
No one walking on a windward water. No one.

Darkness over the waters. The tame tides
Set to the impersonal moon which over Brooklyn
Scatters its loose money. The East River
Constant, turns to the inconstant sea,
A cortege of tired cigars, old photographs,
Letters of credit with their mouths sewn shut, newspapers,
Paler than funeral flowers, its dead men's bones
(All abstract emblems of our civilization)
Bearing my brother:

The tides set toward the Jersey coast, push southward,
Slack from wreck-wreathed Hatteras. And where
The Gulf Stream washes toward the glittering North,
The mystic fog-hung latitudes of myth,
Do those bones live?
Or in the under sea
Processional of equatorial drift,
Or swept beyond Lands End, tossed in the wind,
Or in the mile-long funnels of the dreaming interior
Made part of the steaming legend-haunted sea?

* * *

Someone is dying, someone is being born:
Out of the salt blood, fiercer than the sea
Where the human tide makes in the evening rush:
Grand Central -- Times Square undertow,
Setting to a black moon over Harlem:
Something is dying. Something is being born.

There are ghosts among us. Who was that
In the tombstone hat, the meek hick jacket?
Out of a deeper drowning than the sea,
Out of the cynic north, in that season, the second, where all illusion is lost,
The obscure, terrible coming of our holy ghost.

I did not recognize him under the bridge:
Saw only our human weakness as denominator in that fraction.
But later, I remembered in the flat-lands hearing
That mountain speech, and in the mountains hearing
His speech as of cities, and in the cities hearing
His silence of hawks. And it was easy then
To think how tides had shortened the tough Rockies,
Washed out the Kansas Coast or in the river haunted
Landscapes of New England bore with them this specter
Which haunts all countries in the fifth season.
And felt,
Ambiguous as hope but stronger, something crowding
The hollow channels of the blood, or swept between
The red islands, speaking with the timid tongue,
Naming the devils at the several compass points,
With words for the nightmares of our sunken world,
Calling insurrection, knocking at the tame heart --
"Sleeper awake."

* * *

The ambulance siren drifts in the blue night air.
With tentative provocation the first stars
Put out thin stalks of light, placing their formal
Decorations on a sleeping child. Somewhere
A nightmare sharpens and a man cries out. The young
Mother feels the child kick in her belly.
Once. Twice. And deeper than pain she feels
How out of the submerged life, the human winter,
The young god comes to whom all eyes shall turn.
One class dies. Another is being born.
Word becomes flesh. The Specter becomes real.

Someone is born with the bright face of your brother.


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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