ANOTHER STREET AT THE END OF THE WORLD, for Mark Strand
Who knows how the gods spend their nights.
Do they hang their sweet little heads
In the lullaby of the gallows, just to live a little?
Or with pistols and grenades drawn to hand
Play a game of German spotlight to pass the time?
Is it true, as my kindergarten teacher twice said,
That they live on ‘a peachy isle of black rainbows,’
At the end of which there’s no itchy pot of gold,
But one grey puddle in which all our dreams
And troubles mix? And what about their clothes?
Do they ever go out of style, or is it purely as it was
In those first few chapters of Genesis, without a stitch?
‘If only (again) I could see right through it, to the beyond! –’
Once my Grandfather said before bending my ear
To simply whisper how even the gods spend their nights
Whistling up and down departed streets to keep the silence
Awake—some of them dressed in long evening gowns that,
Grown so thin and tired, reveal old-sailor tattoos, and so confess
Of certain names and dates as if, in this other life, they are
Merely the spent mercenaries of what is something else altogether.
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