To My Old City
You’re still there in the spectral impress,
the plied afterimage grid of trucks
and buses, diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked
on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers
from the black newsstand. Above, the trestle’s
gravel bed hums expectantly, or with relief,
and the gritty pinpoints of snow, at rest
on silver rails, flare into the coming dark,
while everywhere your hungry light still tries
to reconstruct itself, charm the space
in and around the looseknit ironworks,
winter’s checkered yellowings glaring past
the dark. From here, two years away, I see
in your middle distance a trestle stretched
between two brownstones, the whole scene
droning deep: the train tears through the gap,
ratcheting the space with green aquatic squares
that flick past like old sluggish film,
each frame a piece of failing, played-back fact,
and the unseen wheels click, mumble, click
in flukes of young clean snow fountaining up
around those strangers abiding in the glass.
Copyright Credit: W. S. Di Piero, “To My Old City” from The Dog Star. Copyright © 1990 by W. S. Di Piero. Reprinted with the permission of The University of Massachusetts Press.
Source: The Dog Star (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990)