Watch me, I’m running, watch me, I’m dancing, I’m air;

the building I used to live in has been razed and I’m skipping,

hopping, two-footedly leaping across the blocks, bricks,

slabs of concrete, plaster, and other unnameable junk . . .

Or nameable, really, if you look at the wreckage closely . . .

Here, for instance, this shattered I-beam is the Bible,

and this chunk of mortar? Plato, the mortar of mind,

also in pieces, in pieces in me, anyway, in my mind . . .

Aristotle and Nietzsche, Freud and Camus and Buber,

and Christ, even, that year of reading “Paradise Lost,”

when I thought, Hell, why not? but that fractured, too . . .

Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Kant, and Goffman and Marx,

all heaped in the foundation, and I’ve sped through so often

that now I have it by heart, can run, dance, be air,

not think of the spew of intellectual dust I scuffed up

when in my barely broken-in boots I first clumped through

the sanctums of Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, and the Areopagite,

even, whose entire text I typed out—my god, why?—

I didn’t care, I just kept bumping my head on the lintels,

Einstein, the Gnostics, Kabbalah, Saint This and Saint That . . .

Watch me again now, because I’m not alone in my dancing,

my being air, I’m with my poets, my Rilke, my Yeats,

we’re leaping together through the debris, a jumble of wrack,

but my Keats floats across it, my Herbert and Donne,

my Kinnell, my Bishop and Blake are soaring across it,

my Frost, Baudelaire, my Dickinson, Lowell and Larkin,

and my giants, my Whitman, my Shakespeare, my Dante

and Homer; they were the steel, though scouring as I was

the savants and sages half the time I hardly knew it . . .

But Vallejo was there all along, and my Sidney and Shelley,

my Coleridge and Hopkins, there all along with their music,

which is why I can whirl through the rubble of everything else,

the philosophizing and theories, the thesis and anti- and syn-,

all I believed must be what meanings were made of,

when really it was the singing, the choiring, the cadence,

the lull of the vowels, the chromatical consonant clatter . . .

Watch me again, I haven’t landed, I’m hovering here

over the fragments, the remnants, the splinters and shards;

my poets are with me, my soarers, my skimmers, my skaters,

aloft on their song in the ruins, their jubilant song of the ruins.