Meathooks, notebooks,
the whole city sky palely flaming
& spectral bombs
hitting that patch of river
I see from my eastern window.

The poets are dead, the city dying.
Anne, Sylvia, Keats
with his passionate lungs,
Berryman jumping from the bridge & waving,
all the dreamers dead
of their own dreams.

Why have I stayed on as Horatio?
Anne sends poems from the grave,
Sylvia, letters.
John Keats's ghostly cough
comes through the wall board.
What am I doing here?
Why contend?

I am a corpse who moves a pen that writes.
I am a vessel for a voice that echoes.
I write a novel & annihilate whole forests.
I rearrange the cosmos by an inch.

© Erica Mann Jong

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