…a sliver of light hitting the street at an angle…
(Sonya Sklaroff)
as in
what dusk
passes through
how the weight of the not-yet-night-sky upon the rooftops
pushes down upon the thrust of cornice and spire, the light
interpenetrates ochers like red clay dug out from
loam with hand axe or mattock yet is the reverse
of earth being firmament, not firm but atmospheric, some-
how invisible from the sidewalks most of the time walkers
walk by with their dogs on a leash or their ears plugged up
with music then suddenly, up ahead everything lit
up with bonfire you can never think how you did
not notice before. Think Toni Morrison in Jazz describing
the citysky emptying itself of surface, “more like the ocean
than the ocean itself,” so close you could pluck it, a peach
made of scattered light, fine particles born from interstellar
collisions, while the deepening glow grows redder
in dream-space exhuming a buried rhythm beat
from footfall, taxis, curling stream, pigeons, the shuttered
windows flickering with television, fluctuating in shadow
as bodies pass by, all of it rising up and up to meet what’s
falling, pulled earthwards by gravity until an equilibrium
so ephemeral it cannot last longer than minutes arrives to
stretch boundless light: the whole city as living organism