Before Dawn on Bluff Road

By August Kleinzahler b. 1949 August Kleinzahler

The crow’s raw hectoring cry

scoops clean an oval divot

of sky, its fading echo

among the oaks and poplars swallowed

first by a jet banking west

then the Erie-Lackawanna

sounding its horn as it comes through the tunnel

through the cliffs to the river

and around the bend of King’s Cove Bluff,

full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt.

You can hear it in the dark

from beyond what was once the amusement park.

And the wind carries along as well,

from down by the river,

when the tide’s just so,

the drainage just so,

the chemical ghost of old factories,

the rotted piers and warehouses:

lye, pigfat, copra from Lever Bros.,

formaldehyde from the coffee plant,

dyes, unimaginable solvents—

a soup of polymers, oxides,

tailings fifty years old

seeping through the mud, the aroma

almost comforting by now, like food,

wafting into my childhood room

with its fevers and dreams.

My old parents asleep,

only a few yards across the hall,

door open—lest I cry?

I remember

almost nothing of my life.

Source: Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008)

Biography

Often described a “pugnacious” and a “pugilist poet,” August Kleinzahler’s reputation rests on his jazzy, formally inventive and energetic poetry, though he has also garnered notice as something of a bad-boy literary outsider prone to picking fights with the establishment. Hailing originally from Fort Lee, New Jersey, and a long-time resident of San Francisco, Kleinzahler’s fame as a colloquial poet of “dive bars, greasy soup, . . .

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