Crossing a City Highway

The city at 3 a.m. is an ungodly mask the approaching day hides behind & from, the coyote nosing forth, the muscles of something ahead, & a fiery blaze of eighteen-wheelers zoom out of the curved night trees, along the rim of absolute chance. A question hangs in the oily air. She knows he will follow her scent left in the poisoned grass & buzz of chainsaws, if he can unweave a circle of traps around the subdivision. For a breathy moment, she stops on the world’s edge, & then quick as that masters the stars & again slips the noose & darts straight between sedans & SUVs. Don’t try to hide from her kind of blues or the dead nomads who walked trails now paved by wanderlust, an epoch somewhere between tamed & wild. If it were Monday instead of Sunday the outcome may be different, but she’s now in Central Park searching for a Seneca village among painted stones & shrubs, where she’s never been, & lucky she hasn’t forgotten how to jig & kill her way home.