City Sonnets

Trains go where grass grew. Grass grows where trains went.
Here underfoot a hundred needles aim
toward some blank home. Before the silver came
all blades were green. Paths cut, unfurl, go bent
where feet insist. A message only sent
aloft—words float toward birds, dense in the frame,
an edge blacked out and feathered. When they came
the city knew we’d lost what it had meant.
No clear line, only smudge, smoke clotting stack.
You name a thing and think the thing is yours,
too much and not enough faith in a word.
Release your tongue. Let go the rain. The bird
riding the skin or skein of cloud ignores
each name you hurl, each arrow turning back.

Something must be pierced. Veil, skin, last late light
that seeps, hits stoops, declines. A match gone out.
Now dusk, now dark, now fumbled switch, now doubt,
now rutty pigeons scuff and fret the night,
and footsteps strike and pause and hover, might
land, might never. Watch the fog spread lies about
the treetops. Wires. High-rise. Feel gone sun’s clout—
wet slap and chokehold heat, day squeezing tight—
This city made itself, it piled up steel
and thickened walls like skin against the dark.
This city holds its bones in iron bowers
and stutters up the night. A few more hours
and gray promise builds. A bit less dim, more stark—
now brace for it, the grace of it—reveal—

dawn’s flutter, yellow petal, garbage truck,
the city’s gears crank on the wheel of day.
You’re disappointed. Thought that night would stay,
let all the workings blur. The city’s stuck
the same as you. Above cards stamped with luck
spin, caught in spokes of sky. Rip them away,
hurl color to the gray ground’s face and say
as fortunes patter down: look out now—duck!
No one ever died from want of sorrow.
Bone and claw and stub of hope, river’s high
and rising but the city’s rough with thirst
in joists and girders. Still polite: you first,
set out what you have to sell. We might buy
if there’s something we could call tomorrow.