|
Summer of Love in Philadelphia
By Daniel Wilcox
Twenty-two flights above Rittenhouse Square
in the spring of the fall you carved a smilin' pumpkin
candled
at your windowed level,
a
light in the times of horror and stress;
But below,
we wandered our nights with
chapped
hands interlocked, pocketed in my coat suede.
We walked
blind streets of revolutionary warmer, earlier days
and handled
paddles, splashing and pulling canal water,
canoeing near
the Delaware,
swishing
and crossing where Washington
and we escaped
near New Hope,
our newest
way from countless foes
through
spaces of pilings of bridges
of lush
foliage over hung.
We were
loving friends three times over
in the spirit
and the soul and the city;
though warmed
in closeness we never caressed,
for you
talked of betweeness and violin practice
and your
distant boyfriend on the coast.
I called
you evenings when I felt
despair,
drafted away from Nam, taught
to work
with lost children handicapped
by their
errant parent's living.
But summer
saw you in Quaker action
In raining
D.C. for King's impoverished ones
while
I never saw you ever after.
Yet
your letters far crossed this land of Guthrie
from
Reed in the redwoods of Oregon
where
your boyfriend
raised
a fist, radical for Black studies.
But
south of teeming L.A.
in
the movement of the angels,
I
couldn't see clenched hands or shattered glass
like
in the new left bank of America so Isla Vista,
Instead searched of the ancient so
coral
deep in the past
on
the wretched Cross spanning the centuries,
kind
hands outstretched and open wide.
No
more passioned letters reach me,
And
Oregon no longer knows you.
But
I 'wonder' in this living stream —
And will now hold you up in the Light,
for
within my part of you so longs.
|
