The sidewalk oak will no more dance or tremble
When wind howls typhoon-strong past its street-corner;
Age makes the tree be proud and bare and grown, untrimmed.
I see your door where I once begged is now a hole
Where kits of foxes yip and yowl.
I see the chapel where you did not show seems overgrown
With poison ivy vines that glow in fall.
The life I thought was mine is come and gone.
The statue tall and bronzed that was Colossus
To the alley that I met you down is now
A rusty ankle where I carved my name. That’s what remains,
Still tan and smooth, as these things go.
We drank of whiskey, aqua vitae, you and me,
Quaffed it in a hole beside the road,
On landscaped grassy loam,
And on foundations in the night where, during daylight, buildings grew.
Well, should I dig and fetch your bones grown gold
And damp beneath their headstone oak?
Or have the fox-kits long since got to those?
I guess the smog on which we choked has likewise flown,
The air is clean as bleach, as clean as nothing left at all;
The rain’s completely purified the greasy streets.
Shall I leave, or find your grave to throw your wake,
And maybe, spilling finest bourbon on your bed,
cause you to rise again?
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem