6. Portrait

(For S. A.)

TO write one book in five years

or five books in one year,

to be the painter and the thing painted,

… where are we, bo?

Wait—get his number.

The barber shop handling is here

and the tweeds, the cheviot, the Scotch Mist,

and the flame orange scarf.

Yet there is more—he sleeps under bridges

with lonely crazy men; he sits in country

jails with bootleggers; he adopts the children

of broken-down burlesque actresses; he has

cried a heart of tears for Windy MacPherson’s

father; he pencils wrists of lonely women.

Can a man sit at a desk in a skyscraper in Chicago

and be a harnessmaker in a corn town in Iowa

and feel the tall grass coming up in June

and the ache of the cottonwood trees

singing with the prairie wind?