Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
 the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
 talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
 shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three years after--
 And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing
 how we suffer--
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,
 prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of An-
 swers--and my own imagination of a withered leaf--at dawn--
Dreaming back thru life, Your time--and mine accelerating toward Apoca-
 lypse,
the final moment--the flower burning in the Day--and what comes after, 
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom
 Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed--
like a poem in the dark--escaped back to Oblivion--
No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream,
 trapped in its disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worship-
 ping each other,
worshipping the God included in it all--longing or inevitability?--while it
 lasts, a Vision--anything more?
It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,
 Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shoul-
 dering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant--and
 the sky above--an old blue place.
or down the Avenue to the south, to--as I walk toward the Lower East Side
 --where you walked 50 years ago, little girl--from Russia, eating the
 first poisonous tomatoes of America frightened on the dock 
then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?--toward
 Newark--
toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice 
 cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards--
Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school,
 and learning to be mad, in a dream--what is this life?
Toward the Key in the window--and the great Key lays its head of light
 on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the
 sidewalk--in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward
 the Yiddish Theater--and the place of poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now--Strange to have moved
 thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,
with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstops doors and dark boys on
 the street, firs escapes old as you
--Tho you're not old now, that's left here with me--
Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe--and I guess that dies with
 us--enough to cancel all that comes--What came is gone forever
 every time--
That's good!That leaves it open for no regret--no fear radiators, lacklove,
 torture even toothache in the end--
Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul--and the lamb, the soul,
 in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger--hair 
 and teeth--and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin,
 braintricked Implacability.
Ai! ai!we do worse! We are in a fix!And you're out, Death let you out,
 Death had the Mercy, you're done with your century, done with 
 God, done with the path thru it--Done with yourself at last--Pure
 --Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all--before the
 world--
There, rest.No more suffering for you.I know where you've gone, it's good.
No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more 
 fear of Louis,
and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts,
 loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands--
No more of sister Elanor,--she gone before you--we kept it secret you
 killed her--or she killed herself to bear with you--an arthritic heart
 --But Death's killed you both--No matter--
Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and
 weeks--forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address human-
 ity, Chaplin dance in youth,
or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin's at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar
 --by standing room with Elanor & Max--watching also the Capital 
 ists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,
with the YPSL's hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts
 pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and
 laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920
all girls grown old, or dead now, and that long hair in the grave--lucky to
 have husbands later--
You made it--I came too--Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and
 will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer--or kill
 --late