All the policemen, saloonkeepers and efficiency experts in Toledo
knew Bern Dailey; secretary ten years when Whitlock was mayor.
Pickpockets, yeggs, three card men, he knew them all and how they flit
from zone to zone, birds of wind and weather, singers, fighters,
scavengers.
The Washington monument pointed to a new moon for us
and a gang from over the river sang ragtime to a ukelele.
The river mist marched up and down the Potomac, we hunted
the fog-swept Lincoln Memorial, white as a blond woman’s arm.
We circled the city of Washington and came back home four o’clock in the morning,
passing a sign: House Where Abraham Lincoln Died, Admission Cents.
I got a letter from him in Sweden and I sent him a postcard from Norway ..
every newspaper from America ran news of “the flu.”
The path of a night fog swept up the river to the Lincoln Memorial
when I saw it again and alone at a winter’s end, the marble in the mist
white as a blond woman’s arm.
