THE CITY’S TRANSPARENCY

The city’s transparency

gives way to its frames of animation,

the way names shape

expectation, a word’s shift

tilts the plane.

Water surges in the radiator

or it’s just sound. The screen’s blue wave

not a water mirror nor sky-scrim

nor eye-imprimatur

pigment-glint of plastic.

The yellow river, Arno or Neva, corrodes.

Ordering bridges whose other three sides

brace whole pulse,

space-wakeful

as a barely body

paces its machine.

“I’m never sure/of after or before”

rhymes the child-mind

in its habit of eliding.

“Were the tree fir or poplar,

or the cottonwood topple/from its

eruption of mud” the real knowledge of real growth

in real material/enacts a sealing.

“Are they hearts, can they listen?” (in the phone).

An intonation like void-lights or someone

distributing seedlets to mechanical birds.

Nerves’ inadequate dialect and the stammer

and the symptoms and occlusions

make it work.

“Do we scramble the figures/or constellations

of false stars?” Chart as might.

Chart charmed and startled

with the rhythm of its design.

Some year to send tears and parings, already April.

To appear to self as flat roof

or wailing animal. Creator-creature in the box

it built and soiled.