Homage to Mary Hamilton

Thanks to Tom Sleigh for contributing his poem, originally published in The New Yorker, December 20, 2010. http://www.bu.edu/agni/interviews/online/2003/sleigh-wong.html

Homage to Mary Hamilton

I’m driving past discarded tires,

            the all night carwash dreams

near Green-wood Cemetery where

            the otherworld of Queens

puts out trash—trash of Murder, Inc.,

            trash of heartbeat

in recycled newspapers where

            Romeo and Juliet meet.

So much thorny underbrush,

            so much ice overgrowing

my windshield until frost shields a buck

            behind a billboard forest

selling someone’s half-dressed daughter.

            She melts into the defroster

roaring like the rich guys’ helicopters

            at the Wall Street heliport,

rotoring down through skyscrapers

            where torchsong lipstick smears

onto a handkerchief and starched collar.

            But in my face snow blizzards 

up from sixteen wheelers and

            three crows clot against limbs

downswooping, omen of the augurs

            that steers the desperate lovers

to a crossroads, right here. And where mobsters

            and suicides lie buried

and the radio breaks into a ballad 

            of Mary Hamilton’s fair body,

but who’s tied it in her apron

            and thrown it in the sea,

I’m the quake and shortlived quiver,

            the laughter and fractured tale

of her night in the laigh cellar

            with the hichest Stewart of a’.

Oh, she’s washed the Queen’s feet

            and gently laid her down

but a’ the thanks she’s gotten this night’s

            to be hanged in Edinbro’ town.

I’m sitting behind the wheel

            of our mutual desire

when the heel comes off her shoe

            on the Parliament stair

and lang or she cam down again

            she was condemned to dee:

but the instant the news comes on

            and drones spy down

on our compulsions, her hands

            under my hands wrestle

on the wheel as my foot taps

            the brakes, her foot the gas

when out of the gliding dark

            I spot his velvet rack.

Last night there were four Toms,

            today they’ll be but three:

there was Tom Fool, Sweet Tooth Tom,

            Tom the Bomb, and me.