Coal Barons

What she was doing there in the first place
was resting her tired back after the journey
from Lexington to Park and so on
and sat herself down first on one of the stones
guarding a building and then on one of the chairs
in the theater district in the designated space
for the weary of spine—at last—though she would call it
exhausted of hearts for everything in New York
becomes transformed into something else
and it is that something else we love to die for

and like a weeping garland she will end up in
a clown’s suit which I knew a little from wearing
a crepe disguise going from house to house
collecting apples with razor blades inside them
and dumping it all on the kitchen table coughing my
lungs out from the filthy air and the journey
itself begging for Mars Bars and cashews
since I was finally a pirate in crepe as my son
was a corpse in a coffin his mother and her friend
made from a cardboard box painted black
and he was heavily powdered such that the neighbors
were horrified for he was only seven
and knocked on the doors alone or with his friends
in his shocking costume fifty miles east of Pittsburgh
where the coal barons, dressed up as miners
with lights on their heads and cages of canaries
most of them dead mostly named Dickey their
legs in the air, the barons blowing whistles,
oh those barons they loved it, they loved
it, it was the rich in rags
imitating the poor, it’s what they did,

no, it’s what they do, they help each other
into the rotten clothes, they stop to look at
themselves in mirrors they live in fake humility
they carry their lunches in rusty tin lunch boxes

Gerald Stern’s two forthcoming books are Galaxy Love (Poems, Norton) and Death Watch (Memoir, Trinity University Press).