I have walked these streets so often I could
forge the shadows of skyscrapers as they fall
to rest between the sculptured air of midtown.

Air-conditioned blood drips like rosaries
from glassy facades to the cosmopolitan eye

The fantasies of secretaries are washed to the streets
or trampled beneath thick heels along subway platforms

Engineers in orange helmets point out the flawlessness
of buildings which do not yet exist. My hands

Would drip with boredom or lust.   It was time
for evening in Time's Square. There the dim-witted clouds
at once unbuttoned, revealing a nasty aperture beneath
blue cables.

 

***

 

The thick veins on back my forearm
like the rope of an acrobat
have risen again

As a line of demarcation
between fields of battle
which vacillate easily but with some small pain
across this flux of anguish between light and dark
past and future      ash and flowering flame