Poem of the Week

Over the lot a sodium aura

within which

above the new cars sprays

of denser many-colored brightnesses

are rising and falling in a time lapse

of a luminous and ghostly

garden forever flourishing

up out of its own decay.

The cars, meanwhile, modest as angels

or like angelic

hoplites, are arrayed

in rows, obedient to orders

they bear no trace of,

their bodies taintless, at attention,

serving the sheen they bear,

the glittering they are,

the sourceless dazzle

that the showcase window

that the showroom floor

weeps for

when it isn't there -

like patent leather, even the black wheels shine.

Here is the intense

amnesia of the just now

at last no longer longing

in a flowering of lights

beyond which

one by one, haphazardly

the dented, the rusted-through,

metallic Eves and Adams

hurry past, as if ashamed,

their dull beams averted,

low in the historical dark they disappear into.