Sunday in the Park with Ingmar

If Sweden mixed it up with New Orleans
they might have conjured something like
the lurid stark peculiar sultry means
of sweating this Manhattan day appears
to want to foist upon itself: it is the weather’s
vast tumescent gray indifference that appeals:
seals you flat against the city’s spine.

Adjudge as strangely pretty, or malign –
decipher in its broken varied line the trembling
poking charcoal of a Rembrandt or the seismic
needle-charting of the bare preliminary
random rumbles of a geologically shifting
fault: see it as assault or invitation: free
your apprehensiveness enough to render

an embrace: hug this muggy place so full
of needless splay and funk: this junket
to the promise of oblivion: its humidly erupting
stews: if Bergman played the blues, you’d find
him here, dug up from earth, reeking
of unholy birth – bundled, dark, and brooding
at the bar. Sunday in the park with Ingmar.


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