****** city lamps
dreams deferred, dissolved
bloodied and blurred—a mess
of twinkle, small from on high hill.
Brooklyn, heathens still wrapped
in the sacred vestments, bought
from the surplus stores of faith.
Blowing unceremonious smoke
from their windows, they refract
so many distant, hope-stained glints.
Ten thousand single-serve trinities
in every squint run molten. Together,
then apart. Blink one, blink many.
The lamps of the city ***** my eyes.

In the city of hustle and horn, they gather under.
They are the students and the teachers, the movers
and the moved. They are the mothers, the marrow of
this reef concrete. They sustain. On track, on train, kneel
before their black-clad unseen brilliance, cloistered in this tedium,
zipped and snapped up in fleece-lined neoprene like it’s the end.
They alone can stretch and see how it almost always is.
Only those with breath pressed up to the raucous edge
can see the darkness depart for sunrise.

When you get there, to the frozen apple’s core,
climb the first hill that you see. Tall one,
floored in rock a-glitter, breaching the noon frost
at the center. Horizon’s white-hot gleaming.
It’s quiet here. A flock of somethings and someones has
built these lines together. Not a barn, nor cathedral either.
The beams vibrate squirrel and chickadee. Be.
Be still in the ice, and their voices will come down
to shiver your pen across a new page.