To my speeding bullet of brushed steel and flickering
strips, grinding down to gilded concourse,
once a distant dream, now three thousand miles
from home. Over Harlem River, the sun’s golden serenade seeped
through nimbus cracks, cascades from sun-kissed oak-tops
tumbling amber-flush into your arms, fumbling blind
into the future’s gentle embrace. Old City through grime-specked windows,
over brownstones and halogen constellations of dream loft lanterns
past penthouse plumes and navy-washed midtown skies–
I had searched for Gods in words but found them in You
—heart agape, eyes full at Marsalis, Gershwin
and golden horns’ Carnegie swansong,
future’s gates opened in wide embrace to a present:
vast and weighty. With wine-red eyes and fervent, sleepy ecstasy
staggered out through rain-slicked smoky boulevards,
into countless cradled dreams of childhood finally fulfilled,
through the neon veins of a rushing heart, those technicolor avenues.
Tail-light streaks on retreat to home, sauntering back on lamplit tailend
Under veiled heavens peeking out
of suburban darkness, where fleeting youthful treasures keep us holy.
Back to a dorm once meant for only me,
where we sing shape note hymns, godless and sincere,
in search of myths of Old America through worn-out songbooks
and together croon fa-so-la into the age-old hum of the brush
and the rolling asphalt din of our everlasting night