Detroit

IF DETROIT WENT UP IN SMOKE
—for George Oppen

that smoke
would stay inside me

the toke forever
the savage city’s light 

light of the cityscape 
Detroit stylish praise

from one revolution
to another failed one

this is how surrealism
seeks strange resources

neither in word
nor meaning but in style

style haunts modern self
steel and concrete 

we are the skyscrapers
Detroit our experiment

let the stones speak
they always help us grow

we are people of the glass
we touch the distances

beyond pound and olson—
we use spicer instead

on a porch like eigner—
single fingering the typewriter

touching one key at a time—
taking his own time 

the distances the poem
begins