Dislocations

While I sat on the tiles,
and dug at the anchor on my sailor blouse,
Uncle Devereux stood behind me.
He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse.
His face was putty.
His blue coat and white trousers
grew sharper and straighter.
His coat was a blue jay’s tail,
his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle.
He was animated, hierarchical,
like a ginger snap man in a clothes-press.
He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease....
My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles
of earth and lime,
a black pile and a white pile....
Come winter,
Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color
---from Uncle Devereux

This seems like an impossibly prosaic, pedestrian piece of writing but is redeemed in the last line...a 'line of necessity' that summarises being.

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag
-pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad
--from Waking Early Sunday Morning

Time runs, the windshield runs with stars. The past
Is cities from a train, until at last
Its escalating and black windowed blocks
Recoil against a Gothic church. The clocks
Are tolling. I am dying. The shocked stones
Are falling like a ton of bricks and bones
That snap and splinter and descend in glass
Before a priest who mumbles through his Mass
And sprinkles holy water; and the Day
Breaks with its lightning on the man of clay
---from Between the Porch and Altar.

For sheer speed and lightness this is a gem, spiked through with a lightning charge, or a song whose meaning resides in the ability to sing it at the right tempo.