- - for Henry Warwick

 

At the edge of the old neighborhood
near where the high school
friend will end his damnation
against a bridge abutment,
the cat who smells a hint of destiny
beneath the factory haze starts to
float across the road and dies,
flattened by an eighteen wheeler

bound from North Carolina
with two million cigarettes
and a pound of blow
for the avowed center of the world.
Two weeks of sun and traffic
and he becomes a leather shield
marauding children peel from the pavement
and sail from the bridge above,
an alien wobbling back into his hometown,

now whirling like the dinner-plate spacecraft
of the fifties flicks,
theremin music threatening the world
as it is known to be,
now turning like a saw blade
aiming to cut out city cancers --
smoke, meanness, loss and stillness,
sour as the chuckle of true despair.

His dry heart is as light
as his lost cause is just.