Night View from the Back of a Taxi
The skyscraper’s amber-lit windows
are beads on a vertical abacus
reckoning the city’s insomnia,
toting like photons up its sins.
Holes in the dark’s architecture,
rectangular doppelganger of prayer beads
minus the turn and click of hope,
windows are the color of other, density of hush.
I circumnavigate the city for hours, recalling
the scarecrow I’d confused with a crucifix,
my mother’s bonsai heart.
Balanced on the seat beside me
is the bottle of eyebright you gave me,
saying ‘an herb for both memory and eyes’.
I took it, wondering: how can anything good for the memory
also be good for the eyes?
The taxi slows for a yellow—no, a red light.
Color is the Babel of the eyes.
For example, in Ojibwe there is a verb tense
for what was going to happen but then didn’t.
As in, I was going to ask the driver to start homeward,
but then the light turned green.
The city hides its horizon, conceals its vanishing
point—fractal of a planet you cannot fall off of.