***
Everyone is Having Interesting Conversations in New York
They rise like a haze of bees; they hum.
Talk of traffic and real estate
scintillates, as though
the shine off curved sheets
of mirrored glass rising toward satellites
has cast itself across every tone and tongue-
shaped syllable, turning
dullards sharp and spangled, making
an odd chin and offset eyes into goddess:
a sheer thin bolt of fire made flesh
who wheels on her heel;
whose steel stiletto turns the earth.
The set of couples on the 6—their fine
disheveled coifs, their foreheads
glistening with sweat, their eyelids
glazed with copper—speak
of the weather in such a way
No One in History has ever talked of heat
(which is unbearable: every step
into the tunnels a descent
into the throat of a dragon, the hot
blasts of breath the trains leave in their wake
smell of cheese and rank river) and I
want to be the shine on their faces,
their impatience,
want to be the rat making its ginger way
over this greenish crust of pigeon,
the eye of Horus inked beneath
the salt-pepper moss on a sixty-year-old
bicep, the pile of flour-dust bagels
in the window off Houston, the gleaming olive
fallen dirt-caked into the gap of a grate;
I want to be the ridged veins
in the arms of the guy in the Jeter jersey
shooting up the tracks toward
the crumbling house of Ruth,
to be his metallic green sneaker
jittering against the gum-grayed lino,
the Shiba Inus, freshly groomed, their pluming tails
weaving through the moving sleek leg forest
on Madison Avenue, their fur
shining with awapuhi oil, their mouths
stretchy with heat,
the girl with the neck of a geisha
checking the strap of her sandal,
her eyes flicking across me—
I agree with her judgment, I am
insignificant;
whole blessed hours
careen past without me noticing
myself;
I want
to not notice myself—
to sit instead
above this pond nicked with ripples, filmed
with cigarettes and duckweed,
and watch one golden koi float
through the heart of the park,
this glow of fish in which
all the city’s
wound and wheel and tremor
reaches, under milk-green water,
an almost
perfect
stillness.
