Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

tended by
frowning priestesses.
A hurried shadow passes
the darkened Armory,
a faint air of rust
and dampened sulphur.
Long past the freighting time,
the railway tunnel
beneath the street echoes
the shout of a drunkard,
then silence — no,
not silence —
the chittering of rats,
thousands down there
in daily migration
between two rivers.
Does he linger now
before that house
whose double cellar doors
fronting the sidewalk,
where phosphorescent fungi
alarmed his boyhood visits,
and feral scurryings
bred nightmares
of things that gnawed
behind the wallpaper?
He keeps the Capitol in sight,
and overhead, a crescent moon,
and there! a scintilant Venus,
forming a triad with Regulus,
up in the lair of the Lion,
this night of all nights of the year.