Back home from three years' monastery life, working
in Europe, he's in love with these pacific Heights
and genteel streets named for fruit trees that could
never grow here, with Willow Street, especially,

the yellow house where he lives with Jack,
where each dawn they hear—amazing! — a cock crow
from some neighboring yard. Mornings he walks
the Esplanade above the docks and the traffic

seething below towards the city, the tall dazzle
of its skyline a jagged, brilliant rising from the East
River. He notes the flower man with his archaic
dull horse and cart, the young mothers pushing carriages,

their candy-bright hair teased high, and makes his way
to the end of the docks, where the neighborhood
shifts into abandoned warehouses and dim alleys,
where there's a haunted hotel, a fabled ghost who passes

each morning by a fifth-floor window. He's waiting,
unable to finish the book he knows will make him,
until the courts decide: will they swing or no?
They write him from their death row cells. He sends

them cigarettes and books—dictionaries for Perry,
porn for Dick. Swing or no? Once, Perry told him,
Dick ran down a dog on the highway, just for fun.
That's the kind of man he was. Not like him,

Perry said, he was never mean if he could help it,
made Mr. Clutter comfortable before he cut his throat.
The wind off the river smells of bait and coffee
from the trawlers, and the June mornings fairly

gleam. Far west, a Methodist crypt amidst the wheat
fields and prairie wildflowers, the sealed Clutter
house also waits—for the living to claim what
its dead no longer have a use for: pie tins stacked

and shining on a kitchen shelf, a girl's locked diary
buried among schoolbooks, her father's boots ready
by the mud scrape. Beside a narrow bed, left where
he can find them in the morning, a boy's thick glasses.