So Savannah—with Heat and Light Squared, Rhymed, and Wrapped In Crisscrossed Shades and Dusk

 

A tinny, resonant blouse

on a spaghetti strap

wants to be a song,

a tune entwined,

a light wrapped

around a match of sound

and be a speaking art—

 

O sagacious Savannah,

who may never mind

fitting out oneself

so brashly espresso

in such one chorus

in your old corner café  

with other sweet delights!

 

O savant so and Savannah!

And who could have conceived

to build a dream of a town

with so many garden squares

bound by swamps and heat

where the trees and their moss

make out living twilight shade

 

and filled with sainthood

of finely clasping scent!

and old warrior’s monuments

still clad in European fashion

and its last and all but lost

far-roaming, medieval gasp

with its swords and cut-out tails.

 

But thanks to those squares

arrayed as if for a play of chess

with widely branching oaks

I learned that magnificent

and deep and fresh a shade

can be, and even—such a grand

and living thing and spell

 

and that shade in such a state

is a light holding in its breath.

Then right before the City Hall

four neo-Roman temples

cornered Johnson Square

though three of them are banks

and the fourth—a Christian church,

 

marking the new spiritual cardinals

that round the Trinity of One

with the compass’ pious Fourth

that tells in muted tones

who is really the reigning

Republic’s god—simoleons,

shekels, moolah, liquid wealth,

 

wet with certainty and faith

that sings in unison

hymns to debt and death,

but then Savannah Miss

Most Readhead One

Eagle-spreads herself

on the door of Ascension Church

 

across from a drugstore on Bull Street,

reaching for an acme of self-portrait

and, just before and close by

on West State Street, a shouting

black girl is pushing her torso

out of a window of a passing car—

in the eternal thirst and quest

 

after a best seated lotus-embrace.

A long way from the time

when mankind was still offering,

instead of “savings” and cash,

little scrolls with poems

as they still do in Japan

to spirits and shrines.

 

Or must it be solely Socratic

to wonder why potentates

and princes of mankind

chose the most jealous

of all the plausible Geister

to be their supreme judge?

O Savannah, what a savant lass

 

you are and have been

since Sir James Oglethorpe

put you on his gridded map!

Up on your City Hall Tower Clock

twin sunlit conservative ladies loom

high above our heads, Art and Commerce,

in Roman stolas and tunicae intimae,

 

cleaved through high with a leading leg,

just before finishing each other’s

forward, meeting step—

under the vault of the single

and golden Amazonian breast.

So please do tell—who could ever desist

from your song and shade-beholden breath?