3. 

You can fall a long way in sunlight. 
You can fall a long way in the rain. 

The ones who didn’t take the old white horse 
Took the morning train. 

When you go down into the city of the dead 
With its whitewashed walls and winding alleys 
And avenues of autumnal lindens and the heavy bells 
Tolling by the sea, crowds 
Appear from all directions, 
Having left their benches and tiered plazas, 
Laying aside their occupations of reverie 
And gossip and the memory of breathing— 
At least in the most reliable stories, 
Which are the ones the poets tell— 
To hear what scraps you can bring 
Of the news of this world where the air 
Is thin in the high altitudes and 
Of an almost perfect density in the valleys 
And shadows on summer afternoons sometimes 
Achieve a shade of violet that almost never 
Falls across pavements down there. Only the arborist 
In the park never comes for new arrivals. He is not incurious 
But he loves his work, pruning the trees, 
Giving them their graceful lift 
Toward light, and standing back 
To study their shapes, because it is he 
Who gets to decide 
Which limbs get lopped off 
In the kingdom of the dead. 

You can fall a long way in sunlight. 
You can fall a long way in the rain. 

The ones who don’t take the old white horse 
Take the evening train. 


4. 

Today his body is consigned to the flames 
And I begin to understand why people 
Would want to carry a body to the river’s edge 
And build a platform of wood and burn it 
In the wind and scatter the ashes in the river. 
As if to say, take him, fire, take him, air, 
And, river, take him. Downstream. Downstream. 
Watch the ashes disappear in the fast water 
or, in a small flaring of anger, turn away, walk back 
toward the markets and the hum of life, not quite 
saying to yourself There, the hell with it, it’s done.
I said to him once, when he’d gotten into some scrape 
Or other, “You know, you have the impulse control 
Of a ferret.” And he said, “Yeah? I don’t know 
What a ferret is, but I get greedy. I don’t mean to, 
But I get greedy.” An old grubber’s beard, going grey, 
A wheelchair, sweats, a street person’s baseball cap. 
“I’ve been thinking about Billie Holiday, you know 
if she were around now, she’d be nothing. You know 
what I mean? Hip-hop? Never. She had to be born 
at a time when they were writing the kind of songs 
and people were listening to the kind of songs 
she was great at singing.” And I would say, 
“You just got evicted from your apartment, 
you can’t walk, and you have no money, so 
I don’t want to talk to you about Billie Holiday 
Right now, OK.” And he would say, “You know, 
I’m like Mom. I mean, she really had a genius 
For denial, don’t you think? And the thing is. 
You know, she was a pretty happy person.” 
And I would say, “She was not a happy person. 
She was panicky and crippled by guilt at her drinking, 
Hollowed out by it, honeycombed with it, 
And she was evasive to herself about herself, 
And so she couldn’t actually connect with anybody, 
And her only defense was to be chronically cheerful.” 
And he would say, “Worse things than cheerful.” 
Well, I am through with those arguments, 
Except in my head, though I seem not to be through with the habit— 
I thought this poem would end downstream downstream— 
of worrying about where you are and how you’re doing.