The angular underbrush of garbage,
where not crushed, writhing and trembling
in the street-winds’ wakes and eddies,
the road cinched at the throat,
sticky with souring dew of palsied trees.
We are never quite clean: the sunken gutters
bear their residues. I have washed my hands
over and over.
The shock of the eternal present,
the glut of sensation, the assault of light,
and the roaring deafening now all wither
to a desiccated ordinary,
barren and rattling.
You know it as you know all things
you no longer regard as miraculous:
a shadow dyed into the flesh.
The rain, when it comes, is shunted
into fallow fields, the fertile ones
basted with the runoff,
the stalks of weeds upraised.
This oracle clutches even to the cinders
of all things burned.
