FOUNDATIONS

Bright slender expeditious

Poet of the Big

City—it's said 

that you held in your 

(just as) auspicious non-

dominant hand—

the keys to the 

Kingdom of Heaven;

that you—by virtue

of your decades-long independent 

study, your reclusive and muddy 

digging for something secret

and amazing 

in the flotsam fishy 

banks along the ruddy clay 

lake shore—that you alone 

became the one 

true Lord and Savior, protector 

of what was true 

and—more important, what was 

Literary. And eventually, that 

only you could

possess this vast fortune. But how 

generously you flung

the riches back out!

In tremendous spangles, which tended

to dance from

the edges of your fingers

and wriggle directly 

into to the hearts 

and bulimic minds of

millions—as naturally 

as reflections 

of private lights from Gold 

Coast high- 

rise condominiums danced 

(and still 

dance each night) in grand 

ripples across the inscrutable 

face of inky Lake 

Michigan night-water.

But—here

on this white page;

here, where I still come 

to meet you every

afternoon, and practice 

and prove in secret; 

here we both 

know—all you really did

was play 

at pushing around the very same 

currency we all use, albeit

in greater 

denominations,

to tell some folks—
all
flowers smell nice,
all
buildings shall burn, 

and 

etc. etc. etc. And today,

the real beatific reason 

your letters still tend 

to land and stick

and burst to blaze-

up the tawny

pages in their minds—the way 

catapulted waves

of titanium 

sunlight lap and ping the sheer cliffs 

of downtown stainless 

steel and glass—is 

actually because 

you didn't know (and never 

even claimed to)

who 

the hell God was. 

But you were always

pretty passionately damned
sure—he wasn't

you.