Coming Back to Her, Mid-May

She comforts, oddly, in humidity and cloud –
subtle strange distinctions and varieties
of coolnesses that cannot accurately be
deciphered or described – and yet amount to
what enlivens and allows: she is the nth degree

of consanguinity to me: my red blood flows from,
to her mid-May green: we glow with a transmuted
sheen of underwater gold: which tells me
I shall be here with her ‘till I am so wantonly,
ridiculously old that nothing can be done with me

except to throw my cracked crushed empty shell
into some new and necessary well of wet
concrete: please let me, then, oh much-loved-city,
be a street: to kiss the feet of others who one day
will face and celebrate a kindred fate. Ah! –

your finenesses, your greennesses, your gliding
through the springtime air as if you were
a swimming soaring skate, and pearly-emerald
water was your lair: Manhattan I return to you!
Each breath I breathe in you is prayer.

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