The Inexhaustible West of the Heart We dragged our luggage through the slush Squinted in the freezing rain Our soggy socks, the subway crush The wait as they de-iced the plane But to at last alight In the Caribbean night The air like slipping into a waiting bath The ragged rows of hand-fired brick The steeple where the lanterns hung We toured a wooden battleship Saw where they’d placed the harbor guns Beneath a swinging sign We stopped to have some wine The firelight shadows played on the wooden beams So we track down the fugitive summer So vanished worlds may be revived What incantation will let me recover What I was at twenty-five? They sunk the casings in the ground And ran light rail out to the shore They pumped the valley waters down And built the planes that won the war A kid in a basement room Transcribing doo-wop tunes Dreamed a world and by dreaming made it real The westbound wagons tracked the prairie with blood The coast is strewn with dreams that fell apart But there comes a morning when the sunlight will flood The inexhaustible west of the heart