Sirens wail all night on these streets blanketed
(as in, humiliated)
by day’s hurried departure.
Dusk, we say, and the streetlights go on,
or don’t.
Pieces of the leaving light break off and
window by window
lights up the city’s circuit-board,
pitches its small perimeters of protection.
Three blocks over
a corner lot’s surplus and some neglected bits of
sidewalk reappropriated (by whom?)
into a small park in which a brown leather loveseat
rehabituates:
its once-animal skin again sap-drenched
& shivering under a lofty cedar.
To be ec-static means literally to be outside oneself,
insists the theorist,
and what spills over is scripted into another
metaphor for possibility. A young boy keeps
measure of time by the changing view out the window:
old houses carefully emptied then decimated,
a great hole there dug out from which
the fluorescent apartment buildings rise
until his window peers into another’s
and the blinds must hereon stay drawn.
Some dreams a city bites into like fresh fruit
and spits out what seeds get in the way. Does some savvy
critter by cover of night gather these
discarded germs, these devalued futures,
& run them along its invisible maplines
until a garden blooms in the gutters?
