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.