A whole acre’s containment and release,
yellow exhalation; stiff stalk and copper blaze
blaring into the Seventh Avenue A.M.
—sunflowers,
in a square rusting tub casually set
on the linoleum of the corner market
on 17th Street, where the large brusque
and tender Rumanian
barks your order back at you, then places
change in your hand like a benediction.
Against the wall, away from the counter,
sulphurous heads
fused into one radiating distillate
of the infinitive to bloom.
And almost entirely ignored, since
we understand,
even in the eight-o’clock scurry toward
purpose commerce engagement,
that the principal beauty of New York lies
in human faces.
But these foot soldiers of summer—flown
from a Mexican field, boxed north
from Alabama?—neck to neck in an impossible crowd,
they’re our double
and mirror: a hundred fierce dawns
up to their hard green waists
in cool water, shocking
in their sameness
and startling again in the shag
variations of their faces dreaming…
nothing language knows. Though they
are dreaming,
gazes both open and elsewhere
at once. And in this way also resemble us,
half asleep still, unworldly, carrying our sacks
of coffee prepared
as we have requested it, this town’s
flowering and respiration conducted
through our ten thousand acres’
bud and scatter.
This morning on 16th a dragonfly
—intricate, upside down, probably lost but entirely
self-possessed—clung to a brownstone wall,
immobile,
a cistern’s discolored bronze. Fountain
of refreshment, still point of the neighborhood
while taxis fret the air wild between the curbs,
already honking
and braking the song of ongoing and indifferent
setting out, same chorus as my tub of bloom:
basket refilling itself to fuel the multitude
who doesn’t want them,
since we are already flowers, already carry
shoulder to shoulder that diffident power,
stand even now stalk to stripped stalk
in the killing tub,
enough water to sustain a little while,
flaring out at the pores, out through
this dark-rimmed,
gold-dusted seeing.