Fourth Thing

In this driven freezing rain – with all
its riven grainy grays and pearls
retaining those peculiarities of

temperature and glint which most
evoke this city: water giving life
and flintily amoral ice: here is my

Manhattan bared, left naked, like
a screaming baby on a brownstone
stair, indifferently abandoned, yet inanely

full of daring – all despite the lack
of any overseeing care, despite
immersion in an indiscriminate despair:

the thing will rise, repair itself and breathe,
accommodate the high and unrelenting
winter. A virus splinters me: I’m all

porosity. Decembery New York colludes
with it and leaves me bitten. Fourth
thing that this cold has written.


.