Factory æther thickens over the milky lake at sunrise,
Imperially, like smoke from the last cigar of the Czar.
Bruised faces of stevedores clarify along the docks
As if a metaphysical fluoroscope were touching them

With infiltrating radiation – on the other side, the skeletal
Shape of a crane appears against white buildings.
The tannery whistle agitates. This is inescapably Cleveland.
It is morning now, and the bridge remains the bridge.

Down by the stockyard fence, a man in a pea coat staggers.
He was up all night drinking dago red. A sailor let him
Suck his dick, then blackmailed him for ten dollars.
Now he’ll work sixteen hours in a warehouse shifting

Crates of chocolate hearts stamped out for the glorious balls
Of a second-rate midwestern Gilded Age. It isn’t the money
That worries him, the thirty cents an hour. It isn’t top hats
Or new puce gloves. He can’t forget the synaesthesia,

The luminous foretaste of sweat, those syncopated mystical chimes
In the background of his fumbling at the fly-buttons,
The disciplined, improvised slant rhyme of denim and tongue.
Blinding, the incense of horseshit in the gutter.

He chokes on the ecstatic rumble of the fourth dimension’s junk-carts.
Lonely and stupid and sad, the Don’t you love me? of the barges.
And what are those great water-birds writing down there by the garbage?
In this illusion of space, nothing could ever have existed.

Wrong sex. Wrong sense. Wrong city. Wrong bridge. Wrong life.
But who needs another elegy? No one ever dies here either.
It just goes on and on, gold foil on an assembly line, two tons
Of hearts for New York City. Metaphor, riffs the streetcar

Is bear over in the literal Greek. But who says what
Or how heavy?  Blackjack. Crowbar. Hammer. A man
Coldcocked by the shadow of a telephone pole. Think of all they tell you
The soul holds up in the men’s room of the Tower of Light.

Maybe nothing ever meant more on earth than what it weighs.