CROW'S ROSARY
            Scott Edward Anderson
                c. 1987
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Hoboken again after so long gone, yet the gregarious scent of coffee
    lingers;
the ka-chung, ka-choong of the old furnaces is replaced by the dolorous
buttoning of starched white collars--

Tinderbox matchbooks, this town harbors a legacy of fire--
a last-resort for some to stem the tide of condo-conversion.
The siren-scourge filling the air once filled by shipyard steam.

One crow equals one square mile in this mile-square-city and that lone
    crow
follows me from rooftop to steeple, from apartment to train depot,

end to end and back again--"Carrion waiting, carrion waiting!" he
    cawcries.
Somewhere on the cobblestone Court Street, he stops--
the garbage piled high in the alleyway.

Resuming flight, his feathers soiled by ashes, carrion of this
melting pot boiling over too high a flame--his rosary chanted-out above
the rooftops; church bells echo the litany of the displaced, Carry on
    waiting.

"I'll die in your rosary," sighs the Hoboken muse. "So carry on
    waiting."
The Hoboken muse, the wife, dressed in black even in the heat of summer,
soothes the dusky sky.

The hammer's hammer harkens: "Make way!  Make way for the new tide that
rises above the din and dun!  A new sleep is upon us!"

No morning comes without the hammers calling for work to be done;
another home displaced in Hoboken.  They never cease except for
the obligatory coffee break taken 10 minutes after waking us all up.

A peregrine falcon rests on our laundry pole out back,
starling-eyed--showing us the underside of our breadwinning days,
challenging us to use those drear, found things.

The litany of lonesomeness leaves nothing left for the crow's rosary
to be counted on.  In the weepdusk, he cries in a deafening crowd,
"Carry on waiting, carrion.  Carrion waiting!"

The curry-garlic-jalapeno-covered walls and streets now come
prepackaged, processed for microwaves and barbecues--

I see, in my eros-dreaminess, your suppliant flesh
resting on the tar beach; feel the embrace that comes
when our flesh conjugates a verb--

while the crow, soaring alone, surveys the tumult of our disheveled days.
This is a ghost of Hoboken--and I am to carry on with my waiting,
carry on as the crow with his lonesome rosary.

Who has the time to let the coffee steep, to savor the "last drop"?
And what does this new Hoboken mean to us, so unlike what it was to us?

Altar-clouds rise above us, an endless stream of
forgetting and rising, forgetting and rising,
linked by the crow's rosary, the litany of lonesomeness.

There's a gibbous moon out back, illuminating the night kitchen.
"Thee sees we love our garden," says the Hoboken muse.  Let me assure you:
tho it may be only clapboards and clay pots now, its future is ardorous
    bounty..."

We live in shells cast aside by others, hollow bodies awaiting
    obsolescence.
Knowing this, the streets seem more calamitous.
Knowing this, we set-about preparing the earth's redeeming.

Now you come to me with your chalice of hopelessness:
We are never so alone as when we long for lost things.

                                             
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