to Carl Proffer

The concrete needle is shooting its
heroin into cumulous wintry muscle.
From a trash can, a spy plucks the crumpled morsel—
a blueprint of ruins—and glances east.

Ubiquitous figures on horseback: all
four hooves glued to their marble bracket.
The warriors apparently kicked the bucket,
crushing bedbugs on the linen sprawl.

In the twilight, chandeliers gleam, akin
to bonfires; sylphides weave their sweet pattern:
a finger, eight hours poised by the button,
relaxes fondling its hooded twin.

Windowpanes quiver with tulle’s soft ply;
the besom of naked shrubs is bothered
by the evergreen rustle of money, by the
seemingly nonstop July.

A cross between a blade and a raw
throat uttering no sound whatever,
the sharp bend of a level river
glistens, covered with icy straw.

Victim of lungs though friend to words,
the air is transparent, severely punctured
by beaks that treat it as pens treat parchment,
by visible-only-in-profile birds.

This is a flattened colossus veiled
by the gauze thickening on the horizon,
edged with the lacework of wheels gone frozen
after six by the curb’s gray welt.

Like the mouse creeping out of the scarlet crack,
the sunset gnaws hungrily the electric
cheese of the outskirts, erected
by those who clearly trust their knack

for surviving everything: by termites.
Warehouses, surgeries. Having measured
there the proximity of the desert,
the cinnamon-tinted earth waylays its

horizontality in the fake
pyramids, porticoes, rooftops’ ripple,

as the train creeps knowingly, like a snake
to the capital’s only nipple.