Mind and Body

It used to be a baker's; and then what?
Health foods and meditation? My curiosity
too idle, and the parking spaces taken,
I never bothered to find out. Today,
it's out of business. Strange

that a thing so merely in a corner of the eye,
no former marriage-house or place of meeting
- even once only - some remembered face,
should summon such a crowd;

but even before the lights they were
unquestionably there: Altair, Jerusalem,
Sirius, Dresden, Vega, Troy

(and other lots in time and space,
none less remarkable than another):

the ancient starlight of lost multitudes, broadcast signals
from the Roman wheelwright, or the shipwright of Piraeus:
patient, expectant messages that having travelled through
both clear and cloudy ages, are now received at last, again,
uncomprehendingly, here in the studios of this anarchic city;
received much later than the signaller intended, who long ago

flamed out in pain, or whose light spirit,
collapsing into heavy bones, went out.

Anarchic skull-bound city,
its stores and workshops crowded high
in airless density, its hinterlands
unmapped and sinister,

that grows so quickly thronged
with transient poor, and purposeful
with communistic dreams: after its day

- the last call-signal started on its way,
the briefest, without the unsortable junk,
the casual mysteries of windblown paper,
street-faces and abandoned shops -

after its day, no record but the fading
word, the mouldering bones. Well,
as it happens, this is where

the winking hearse will pass, smartly towards
the boneyard on the right. And Mind and Body
will be something else by then.