When I step forward to go to her
the concrete turns mushy and I sink in;
then it sets. Maybe she too stands
on a sidewalk somewhere, feet stuck.
More likely she sits on her bed,
bent forward, brushing yellow hair
over her head. If a few strands could
escape and blow here, that would be how
the wind passing under the streetlight
gets its glitter. A woman folds up
for the night on the bank steps,
a man works himself feet first into
a cardboard box—without a bedfellow,
or a face doughy from cold nights
a face could nuzzle. A bottle a passer
kicks into the street goes spinning across
the cobblestones’ falsetto notes.
In a great hall a countertenor
rises up on tiptoe, opens his throat,
unspoons them into heaven. The bottle
chucks the cobblestones’ fat cheeks.
A little girl wakes to ecstatic murder
taking place in some guttural language,
runs, peeks, watches a man and woman,
steady as a backyard oil jack,
pumping her back down into nonexistence.
A strand of yellow hair hits my forehead,
presses across it a familiar double-humped wobble.
The bottle stops. The man in the box
gropes in his fly, finds only a worm.
The woman on the steps finds a dry well
under the wilful hair. The wind turns cold.
The cobblestones soon will be rattling
in their sockets. What’s going to happen?
Some will stay put. Some will change sleeping streets,
some will disappear for a stricter reason.
Enough will get bumped from home to replace them.
She will fly to California and marry.
The night runs out of gold. And I
am almost as old as my father.