The City

you have come all burnished

and unused to the kid-brother city

the city of strollers of gum

stuck to public sculpture like an edit

in the summer’s early shot

at saying something true you’ve come

ready in the brain with your three

pairs of gray shorts hungry

for a new gull to gargle out

the morning you’ve come under

the spell of daytime its wetness

kissing the sill where the A/C dumps

its coins around you and is that

sound a pair of squirrels flirting

in the summer’s overflow or a stray

bit of tree clattering across the gutters

undeterred in the city of youth

absconding to the hedgerow

to tangle they never imagined a city

could talk so deeply its wheezing

pressure systems rubbing leaf

to leaf an untranslatable weather

in your bones and you are the hallway

of jewelweed the Asian lady beetles

patrolling in their longing for salt

they may bite but it is not anger

it is not love the city asks for