Vigil

On a bus rushing by Goodale Park
An old black man teases a younger one
about the huge Bible he’s carrying,
its wild mane of color-coded bookmarks.
The younger man opens the book,
stands up, removes his coat
and runs his finger along a passage as he preaches,
pointing up in the air, back to the book,
the long nave of the bus
his impromptu church.

In the park
a homeless man lies punch drunk
on a stone picnic table, wondering
where his way of life went, the dignity
of two busy hands, filled with sun,
how they were emptied,
why he didn’t migrate with the others,
where he will pass the night,
where he will pass the winter.
A fly circles him, in love with his stink.

An engine quakes nervously,
drinking the pond through a straw.
It’s not yet a ditch
but a forest of lily pads.

A table at a tavern across the way
is bereft of conversation,
the faces are all at the bar
mesmerized by the blue screens hanging above.

Dennison Avenue
bordering the west side of the park,
the first home I ever made for myself,
where the sovereign lives of
a block of citizens
lie peacefully against each other.
You’d never know people lived in
these houses, so empty during the day,
so dark during the night.
In the front yards political signs
withstand the wind like stubborn sails,
their chests bulge but the land does not budge.

I lie in the magnolia grove,
a trunk my pillow, my ear leaned
against a yard of dirt,
bombed-out and war torn,
every inch a civilization
consistently defying ruin.
The twig makes sense in the dirt,
the order of disorder.
I come upon the top of
an acorn’s skull,
the faint concentric circles
rippling outward.
What a little acorn lid,
I think it is my church!

I press my palm to the chest of the earth,
these forty acres I strode the season long;
I went walking with the trees at night,
The magnolias, the violet bush
suddenly burst at the foot of my porch, cousin to
the garden of July fireworks grown in the sky.
This park, this street, this open air,
where I wooed back my soul,
my laboratories all, my teachers and companions all,
whispering things to put on the page,
whispering things to put in my heart.
I spent my summer hanging out with the elms
and their squirrels, unsure as they were
about this world storming up all around us,
estranged from humanity,
but not from nature,
not from myself,
and getting to know God.

The last light of day
is ascending the trees,
burnishing the leaves
an incandescent yellow.
Long shadows stretch
over the earth like stockings.
A helicopter seed gently
whirs down into silence.
The sun is singing
to a great reef of clouds
as spring flowers
aspiring flowers
lie in their graves
waiting to be born.
A thousand generations sleep
in the womb of an acorn.

I am swept up by a great wind
to laugh with the leaves
dancing at the crest of the trees
above the shadows
rising like a flood.
The sky reaches down,
offering its hand,
and snatches up
the liminal strip of light.

The whole neighborhood is dark
except for a a window
illuminated like a manuscript
where a young man writes at an oak desk
by a little flame
burning in the corner
that will stay on all night.