Homage To Mary Hamilton

I’m driving past discarded tires,
      the all-night car wash 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 torch-song 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 short-lived 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.