In Winter, Now

Crepuscular mid-winter’s shadow and its harrowing
noon glare – you learn to bear the season’s panoply
of lighting tricks: and how the mix transfixes –
tethered irremediably to what you would like to think
you know as “now” – now, and here, uncapturably queer
and changing, changing so immutably that changing
loses meaning: what else is there but what teems?

What’s a moment, anyway? And then to factor in its
strange exacting and immersive play with this Manhattan
sway and tilt and specificity: if you were to walk outside
with me today, you’d know that there was something
idiosyncratic, insubstantial and hilarious about this city’s
glow: the slushy heaps of January snow all seeping into,
onto, over, under feet; the passing beeps of taxis

and cell phones – the furrowed brows of babies, lovers,
athletes and the elderly: the ultimate fine distillation
of the human: irrepressible and secret through faint
rumbles of the subway from below, and plops
of melting muck that hit you in the head which drop
from overhanging eaves and cornices of New York City’s
living monuments to its unbridled dead: tenements

and row-houses unsentimentally remind you of their
ghostly cold fraternity: and you, and they, live in the city’s
stasis of eternity – in winter, now, revolving, changing,
ranging and evolving: there’s no difference at last
between the past and you: leveraging any notion
of the ultimately true to silliness: kept everlastingly at bay:
and wintry New York City lets you know this every day.



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