78.

On the frontier poetry is a sign

something almost irrelevant, not quite

benign, a signatory to a contract

nearly broken that sweat and grease

and money matter most. How much

could he cheat books and theories

twilight and the rose would mean

success, cars and clothes, rhymes

of a different order, from paradigms

that take account of a different music.

He carved out his guilt and perverse

talent in chapbooks of uncertain design

and the smell of pulp and coal

were really no diferent than fumes

in gridlock by the exchange

in a town, now a vast conurbation,

his family left so long ago now

when the Revolution had them by the throat.