A Life

And does death mean sunset as well?
Strauss wants to know before he goes
Straight down to hell. Wait? What?

Who gets dragged down to hell these days
Or back in those Viennese days
When a waltz called could be swift

And the blues themselves, southern, Black,
American, had yet to be
Debated: unique idiom?

Or backward glance toward Uncle Tom
And gratitude surpassing ice
For riparian undergrounds?

The Holland Tunnel from Jersey
(New) to New York (old) opened up
About the time my grandparents

Prosaic, uninclined to rhyme,
Married themselves in Passaic
Then drove their Ford to Niagara.

What should we hold each age of ice,
Fore or aft, responsible for, anymore,
As we warm and suffer and know?

The last question of an honest soul,
However embodied and discombobulated
Is when can I get out on terms something like my own?