W. S. Di Piero

Trying to find my roost one lidded, late afternoon, the consolation of color worked up like neediness, like craving chocolate, I’m at Art Institute favorites: Velasquez’s “Servant,” her bashful attention fixed to place things just right, Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,” whose fishy fingers seem never to do a day’s work, the great stone lions outside monumentally pissed by jumbo wreaths and ribbons municipal good cheer yoked around their heads. Mealy mist. Furred air. I walk north across the river, Christmas lights crushed on skyscraper glass, bling stringing Michigan Ave., sunlight’s last-gasp sighing through the artless fog. Vague fatigued promise hangs in the low darkened sky when bunched scrawny starlings rattle up from trees, switchback and snag like tossed rags dressing the bare wintering branches, black-on-black shining, and I’m in a moment more like a fore-moment: from the sidewalk, watching them poised without purpose, I feel lifted inside the common hazards and orders of things when from their stillness, the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds erupt again, clap, elated weather- making wing-clouds changing, smithereened back and forth, now already gone to follow the river’s running course.

Use me Abuse me Turn wheels of fire on manhole hotheads Sing me Sour me Secrete dark matter’s sheen on our smarting skin Rise and shine In puddle shallows under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd somnambulists and sleepyheads Wake us Speak to us Bless what you’ve nurtured in your pits the rats voles roaches and all outlivers of your obscene ethic and politics Crawl on us Fall on us you elevations that break and vein down to sulfuric fiber-optic wrecks through drill-bit dirt to bedrock Beat our brows Flee our sorrows Sleep tight with your ultraviolets righteous mica and drainage seeps your gorgeous color-chart container ships and cab-top numbers squinting in the mist

Use me Abuse me Turn wheels of fire on manhole hotheads Sing me Sour me Secrete dark matter’s sheen on our smarting skin Rise and shine In puddle shallows under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd somnambulists and sleepyheads Wake us Speak to us Bless what you’ve nurtured in your pits the rats voles roaches and all outlivers of your obscene ethic and politics Crawl on us Fall on us you elevations that break and vein down to sulfuric fiber-optic wrecks through drill-bit dirt to bedrock Beat our brows Flee our sorrows Sleep tight with your ultraviolets righteous mica and drainage seeps your gorgeous color-chart container ships and cab-top numbers squinting in the mist

A grainy predawn dark, early Expressway traffic bleeding arterial tail lights across gray water and its blue heart. Under Lemon Hill, grunts from Boathouse Row, woodshop clunks, young men’s voices too loud for a day exhaling into starless skies, bad boys after keg night, hungover, push long sculls into the water and slice its marcelled run, a marbled peacock wake behind each stroke and coxswain counting that muscled steadiness past the Water Works, Spring Garden Street Bridge then Girard Avenue Bridge, where on the bank Eakins sketches Max Schmitt in a single scull, his light like this, tinfoil blue, where the crews sweat off last night’s lost time but won’t row too far north to river canals, Manayunk Reach, its towpath, mules and barges and anthracite from Point Carbon to feed stoves and Bessemers in Harrisburg, Pittsburgh