Somewhere downtown there is a parade flocked by crowds
of adults in parkas carrying take-out coffee
and ministering to their children. Let the kids
in front is a phrase being repeated up and down
Broadway. Up and down Broadway the kids, in front,
are looking back through the crowd every thirty seconds
to make sure their parents haven’t disappeared,
their experience of the clowns and floats and bands
becoming fractured and anxious. For many,
these events are more fun in retrospect.
Uptown, I am watching the weather. A cold
front bearing high winds, dark clouds, and bursts
of blue is coming through, the air so brittle
that the soft rain shatters against it into pins.
Nevertheless, there is the sound of heavy rain:
fallen leaves driven down the middle
of the empty street, their scrape and sweep
indistinguishable from the smack of water
hitting rock. With each gust of wind, from the tree
outside my window more brown leaves fly up
like startled birds, descending in lengthy spirals
to lodge damply on the windshields of parked cars
and at the curb. Close by, someone is practicing
the trumpet, holding each note until
it dwindles out from under the diaphragm.
At street level, our neighbor is leaving the building
with his two young children. They are all carrying
shopping bags, going to the car, going away.
I may imagine myself to be a monk
at the window of my cell in the monastery,
choosing to record life with various additions
of detail—here a shadow in gold leaf,
there a small blue beast, on the facing page
a rose bush with prominent thorns—looking up
occasionally to measure how much light
is left in the sky because candles are hard
to come by, and finally pushing aside frail
regret along with my colors to join the others
for the evening, but even so it all comes back
to children marching into life armed with a bright
uncertainty that promises, at whatever cost,
to renew itself. Let the kids in front so they can see.