Song or Poem

I do not know
where the guitar goes
when my song is ended.

No strings broken
to be replaced, drawn
tight over the last bridge.

O Brooklyn Bridge, shining in the darkness
what’s the sound of foot traffic doing here,
where the brave, sad poet wrote the night through?

Why did others think him wild in his day?
Who set the moral tone of his dark time,
when a man loving a man was a crime?

Coming home from Mexico his friend’s wife
was on her own and wanted to love him,
but could not lead him into her own life.

You can make a song out of nothing else
but words he left alone to let them breathe
the island air as he swam out to sea.

I don’t know how
to make this a song.
It’s a poem gone wrong.

Siqueiros sat him down and drew his face
bent over drafts of The Broken Tower
to be Collected Poems’ frontispiece.

Harold Hart Crane
was doomed from the start
to have no life but art.

(19 May 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander