London New Year

by John Phillip Santos


Mud rakers and tramps looked up
from beneath the bridge, beyond the gulls;
they stopped a moment to see us coming.
    A barge bound for Henley
had been loaded that morning
with iron scraps and sulphur . . .
and a yellow mist
    blew out behind it
        all the way down.

They shuttle through old shells
and find aluminum
and prophylactics,
    the driftwood they burn in alleys,
or a herring, lacking air,
blushing on the grey bank.
I say to her now:
    cast away your shoes
        cast them down.

A canyon was filled with water
in Texas, the hole
at Sutton Hoo with dirt.
    Implements of older life are retrieved
in knives shaped like trees,
golden vials full of sand:
and Dan dove down –
    he found roads there,
        empty, watery towns.

The government of London dissolves
with dusk. Relics of Cotulla
can be seen on the river!  1843 . . .
    only fifty-eight men
by then, in Oxford, farming
the land between the factories;
or Laredo, that New Year’s day,
    when the bodies of forty
        young Mexicans are found.

Legions of tramps stumbled back
along the levee walls
while gentle trains passed and fell.
We kept no souvenir, no map
or diary of how the year passed.
Only darkness as we crossed,
and darkness with seventeen skiffs,
    floating towards Greenwich,
        braziers glowing on their polished decks

 

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