If I Am to Love New York

If I am to love New York, then I shall love
these days-in-wait of jury duty: love each
tantalizing bit of its unfolding evidence:
that balding lean man's casually dangling
rocking foot, blue jeans, brown cowboy boot,
leg crossing, knee on knee – the hangdog
breasts in black-lace cleavage on the bright
blonde sixty-year-old lady to my left –

the angularly frowning pimpled nineteen-
year-old boy whose sinister black tee-shirt
advertises MEGADETH – the restive tailored
forty-something businesswoman who re-checks
her I-Phone every sixty-seven seconds –
and the lank-haired, deeply silent sweat-shirt-
hooded brooding man who makes a show
of reading Edgar Allan Poe (“Collected Poems”),

but looks as though he'd stopped attempting
to make sense of it too long ago to count:
these specificities amass to an amount –
multiplied by dozens more – incrementally
convincing me that we are cousins – all by right
of being part of an incontrovertible design: we
find our idiosyncratic ambiguities within the sieve
and grind and grid of this Manhattan Island:

blessed herd of sheep! I shall sleep and dream
about us all, tonight, and let the Cowboy
kiss the Cleavage Lady’s cleavage, let
the Businesswoman get her worries off her chest
to that remarkably insightful thrash-and-metal
Kid, and in the middle of our gala’s glow,
allow my sweat-shirt-hooded Brooder to shout
frightful drunken rounds of Edgar Allan Poe.