Even if you were above the ground this year,

You would not know my face.

One of the small boys, one of the briefly green,

I prowled with the others along the Ohio,

Raised hell in the B & O boxcars after dark,

And sometimes in the evening

Chawed the knots out of my trousers

On the river bank, while the other

Children of blast furnace and mine

Fought and sang in the channel-current,

Daring the Ohio.

Shepherd of the dead, one of the tall men,

I did not know your face.

One summer dog-day after another,

You rose and gathered your gear

And slogged down hill of the river ditch to dive

Into the blind channel. You dragged your hooks

All over the rubble sludge and lifted

The twelve-year bones.

Now you are dead and turned over

To the appropriate authorities, Christ

Have mercy on me, I would come to the funeral home

If I were home

In Martins Ferry, Ohio.

I would bring to your still face a dozen

Modest and gaudy carnations.

But I am not home in my place

Where I was born and my friends drowned.

So I dream of you, mourning.

I walk down the B & O track

Near the sewer main.

And there I gather, and here I gather

The flowers I only know best.

The spring leaves of the sumac

Stink only a little less worse

Than the sewer main, and up above that gouged hill

Where somebody half-crazy tossed a cigarette

Straight down into a pile of sawdust

In the heart of the LaBelle Lumber Company,

There, on the blank mill field, it is the blind and tough

Fireweeds I gather and bring home.

To you, for my drowned friends, I offer

The true sumac, and the foul trillium

Whose varicose bloom swells the soil with its bruise;

And a little later, I bring

The still totally unbelievable spring beauty

That for some hidden reason nobody raped

To death in Ohio.