Surveillance

Punctual as the evening star
a Baltimore Police helicopter
snoops over my head at sunset
and through its open door a searchlight
points to me as someone
who in passing came to stay.

*

My day done
returns again

and with it the wharf-wreck
that saw George Keats brother of John
step down with a host
onto these cobbles under this sun

the broken spars
where he escaped the burden of society
and slipped beyond The Daily Grind
towards the Mississippi and the West.

*

That sun today
that crashed sun
reflecting off the bay
to double in the brightness falling still

divided up the air in silky strings and so
also made way for Domino
and Under Armour

and the iron-filings multitude
of ships and docks and cranes around the bay
to slither through

and after them a clipper and its crew
all busy with their afterlives
I also saw
appear and disappear.

*

But you know The Wire,
everyone’s seen The Wire,
and let me tell you
when last week a traffic light
turned red in the middle of nowhere
my car was surrounded
before I could disappear.

I was listening to Kathleen Ferrier
singing Das Lied von der Erde
when they smote on my window.
But no problemo.
I was given a safe passage
after sharing a moment
the beauty of those notes.

*

‘If it’s windy you think you’re going fast
but you’re not moving you’re at 500 feet
and the searchlight definitely helps out
when you can’t find what you’re wanting
such as a suspect fleeing officers who lies
in a park and throws leaves over himself.

It’s a different ballgame from ground level.
You can see his body shining like a torch
under a blanket in the dark. You see heat
coming out. Or you have an officer hurt
and you control the scene and every light.
Downtown is a heart and streets are veins.
I watch the traffic flow and calculate its rate
a patient expert after months of training.’

*

What else was there to find today
when I turned from Jerusalem
along Gunpowder Falls through trees
too close to enter otherwise
if not those maples and their shade

that blackbird on its throne of moss
that mushroom sunk beside itself
brown trout crisscrossing bearded stones
like tricks of dusty summer light

and something I could never see
that watched me through a froth of leaves
and bided time until I reached
the end of where I meant to be
then owned again the way I came.

*

On the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake
a pelican pumps his elbows
and the blossom on my myrtle shakes.

The same soft wind has set me upright here
and fireflies wait on me or would
if I did not already wait on them.

*

Workmen in yellow hats like little suns
set in the windows of the new hotel;
the chandeliers light up; the beds are made;
the kitchen stoves burn off their film of dust;
and soon the bright Reception will sign in
its first night-cargo of new guests to stay
in time that runs in parallel to mine
and look, when they turn outwards to the world,
at me and others strolling by as part
of something not quite real, that only lives
while they are here to see it, then becomes
the sum of everything they know and may
remember of the streets and squares where I
continue with the things that pass away.