'MAN ON A FIRE ESCAPE' AND 'DAYS OF 1968' POEMS BY EDWARD HIRSCH
Man on a Fire Escape
He couldn't remember what propelled him
out of the bedroom window onto the fire escape
of his fifth-floor walkup on the river,
so that he could see, as if for the first time,
sunset settling down on the dazed cityscape
and tugboats pulling barges up the river.
There were barred windows glaring at him
from the other side of the street
while the sun deepened into a smoky flare
that scalded the clouds gold-vermillion.
It was just an ordinary autumn twilight —
the kind he had witnessed often before —
but then the day brightened almost unnaturally
into a rusting, burnished, purplish-red haze
and everything burst into flame;
the factories pouring smoke into the sky,
the trees and shrubs, the shadows,
of pedestrians scorched and rushing home. . . .
There were storefronts going blind and cars
burning on the parkway and steel girders
collapsing into the polluted waves.
Even the latticed fretwork of stairs
where he was standing, even the first stars
climbing out of their sunlit graves
were branded and lifted up, consumed by fire.
It was like watching the start of Armageddon,
like seeing his mother dipped in flame. . . .
And then he closed his eyes and it was over.
Just like that. When he opened them again
the world had reassembled beyond harm.
So where had he crossed to? Nowhere.
And what had he seen? Nothing. No foghorns
called out to each other, as if in a dream,
and no moon rose over the dark river
like a warning — icy, long forgotten —
while he turned back to an empty room.
Days of 1968
She walked through Grant Park during the red days of summer.
One morning she woke up and smelled tear gas in her hair.
She liked Big Brother and the Holding Company, Bob Dylan,
Sly & the Family Stone, The Mothers of Invention.
When Jimi Hendrix played Purple Haze in a jam session
she had a vision of the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee Nation.
She dropped acid assiduously for more than a year.
She sang, "I want to take you higher and higher,"
and dreamt of cleansing the doors of perception.
After she joined the Sky Church I never saw her again .. .
Days of 1968, sometimes your shutters open
and I glimpse a star gleaming in the constellations.
I can almost reach up and snag her by the hand.
I can go to her if I don't look back at the ground.
