To My Old City

You’re still there in the spectral impress, the plied afterimage grid of trucks and buses, diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers from the black newsstand. Above, the trestle’s gravel bed hums expectantly, or with relief, and the gritty pinpoints of snow, at rest on silver rails, flare into the coming dark, while everywhere your hungry light still tries to reconstruct itself, charm the space in and around the looseknit ironworks, winter’s checkered yellowings glaring past the dark. From here, two years away, I see in your middle distance a trestle stretched between two brownstones, the whole scene droning deep: the train tears through the gap, ratcheting the space with green aquatic squares that flick past like old sluggish film, each frame a piece of failing, played-back fact, and the unseen wheels click, mumble, click in flukes of young clean snow fountaining up around those strangers abiding in the glass.