often when I’m walking and I latch
onto a scene, say the numbness
of a foyer
a light demanding
presence, like the hum inside
caffeine
I’ll come across a staircase
in the alley
and its refusal to be stairs
and its daydream of the sky
but to your question as a child
as to when the city will be finished
I think of how I once drowned
my great-grandfather’s Buick in a ditch
and what the tow-truck driver told me
from the way his eyelids lagged that
our designs were elsewhere, seeping
dying to be let in
