St. Louis Shell Game

originally written August 16, 1995; redone March 25, 1999.

The universities are dead hayfields,
so let's go to the eternal breweries, down to
where only the tumbleweeds will want to care about
your cardinals, rams, and hawks, your browns and blues.

And blues? Clarinets and double-basses
should play the masters, not for change
in the streets, for your lying legends
of "Busch Stadium" or "Route 66."

Four hours to Kansas City? Three days
if you're a letter? What monsters
but the four angels you hallucinate beside me
run that fast, and how high? Tell them.

One of us is eighty years old, and the other is ten,
and 1955 is a hundred years away,
but which of us is which, and in which century?