errol miller
AFTER DINNER MUSIC
For Greenwich Village
Unique approach to wilderness
the back street artists howl
that old familiar
harpsichord of want and need
a long night's drive away from Chicago
and the Southland's steamy glitter
they have been given golden voices to distort
they squeeze out mundane nouns and verbs
wrapped in time's swaddling belt
linking up with a perpetual system
of death and decay: renewal is just a silly
Freudian transitional thing
from Grimm's fairy tales or Frost's road not taken
slipping out of Oxford's plain brown literature
to use, to use again
the resourcefulness of life and death
and the alluvial gilded gulf between
the great blue blur of change
they are blowing out the candles in
the sad cafes lining the Avenue
they are closing all the wine shops
taking domestic animals
to slaughter, and we with them.
