The birds, the moon, the water tower sky,
The strokes of cloud that match the mountain outline
As the crows roost on telephone wires
Above lamps still on after all-night incandescence:
It's the kind of morning where rusted roof tin
Says it exists below distracted sun
And smoke is blue in the waking stacks
Where workers, like the crows, descend and fuss.
The only story in the news today
Is what rises here before me, entering blue sky,
Like smoke from the humus truck, shovels in place.
The sheriff wears a gun but just in case.
There are no more ideas to perform. They were only tools,
Like these backhoes shining in lines of disuse, for another time,
An emergency, what seems to occur less and less
The longer the risky tooth of life bears down.
It's enough, the light on the buildings. I don't want to know
What the homeless man smokes, if there's loaves
Inside those bread trucks, much less the scores
From 1952, what seemed the last accessible clue.
Most of the people on the platform and in seats
Still scan for the rage bait oracle, but one lady
Runs to catch up with light from her eyes
To a man on a walker who knows to go so slow.
"Hopes" and "Dreno" have not been erased yet
But they live no other place than in my heart
That knows now only what love feels like,
Having discovered it and accepting nothing less.
