tuesday, november 9
i leave the office around sunset,
a day of academic language and
bureaucracy leaking out of my ears
and walking to my car, the perfect
beauty of all light at november
dusk is everywhere. west, the sky
is full of near-flame, cloud and the
slashes of jet contrails.
east just above the university,
the sunfall is echoed
everything limned in pink:
a color so beautiful
in the state of nature
that it renders every
manufactured imitation brittle and false
here is some kind of symbiosis: a coaltrain moves below the
footbridge, and yellow light circles underneath
lamp-poles near the baseball park. somewhere
there are stacks and smoke, a plume of steam
and all these wires are fed, back to the places
where trains pass so much streetlit concrete,
stoplights and spotlights on billboards, yardlights
in farmyards and windows glowing out onto lawns.