How a fuchsia blouse becomes
bougainvillea, or
a pair of greyhounds staggers
into abstraction, zigzag
of an aqua Vespa down the Ave.,
giving glint to a trumpet
swaddled in the driver’s jacket,
its brother muted
in song, in the restaurant,
behind transparent curtains.
It was impossible to see,
in the childhood house, a future,
but it came, this undoing
of the sugar cubes’ paper,
offering pleasure, erasure,
double dose, with rain
blurring a statue’s torso.
One needle plunging through
the indifferent air,
is there anything lonelier?
A woman sits in a blissed-
out smile of pearls. An
ambulance releases its donkey cry.
Shudder up the spine, as sky-
blue eyes roll back in a head,
flame skidding, near death,
when a door opens for a stranger,
then rises, miraculous, again.