Humid Morning

Every house in the neighborhood
Folds into memory
Of similar places,

Holding onto fullness like plastic grapes.

The spaces my empty heart and mind
Asked once to fill
Are still, with these new places, full.

The grass itself shines with the past
Upward like dew to mingle in the vapors
Of an uncertain present

Where all is keyed to what is lost:

A box the sun dissolved,
Whose shape still shadows the very sky,
And leans on waving palms
And bloom-specked hedges

Like a cross that decides
Whether that which is
Has a right to be;

And whether the strangeness in this morning
Is absorbed or discarded
Like the black dress
Dumped on a tuft in the alley,
Glowing without meaning.