Cloud Drift

Wordsworth, strolling lonely in his bones
past daffodils, and cows. How now
the heifers in a crowd, some brown
some, no, no, no…he felt a poem come
beneath the clouds. If only Dorothy…

He turned his head across the vale
to the sound of saxophone,
half a century before it was,
such a visionary, he. The Bird,
not nightingale nor cottage dove

came in alto waves, be and bop.
Charlie P. would take the train far out
of town from Kansas City to district
lakes and serenade the green Grass-
mere cows to yield in their milky way.

In that cathedral abbey, not Tintern’s
stones, but gothic Brooklyn Bridge,
another jazzman, round midnight, wailed
his chords to those on the ledge, lonely
as a cloud, they listened till foggy dawn.