From a College Window

For children of fireweed, sirens, barrack squares,
pre-emptive strikes and midnight conversation,
it is playtime in a cold city. Three locust years.
We watch with incurious fascination

as clout upon trembling clout, this giant ball
brings Rance’s Folly sliding to the ground;
banquet and roof-top tennis, fix and deal
waft up and away to never-never land –

Victorian ghost-life, pushing fists of cloud
past look-alikes of chimneys, windows, doors.
The breeze swings on its hinge: a gaseous shroud
street-corners it about some sad-case stairs

and this dull thing, clubbing the old stuff dead:
stahlhelm, the mailed fist in the mailed glove
at home with oak-leaf, laurel, the nipped bud,
...