What we or now they call graphics of gentle sand seeming
the street into this parking lot
with all the cobble is buried and
with asphalt too, catalyzed with worms in
arching near the treelines, obscured
decomposing edifice of forest
by towers of orange leaves.
Ingraciously the parking lot,
if not for the people it houses
itself a light thing
who orbit a particularly dense bridge,
dense not for mass but it is heavy with title
etch and carved into the
dark burn of a discarded name from
sheen-oil hardwood the rosinous
biblical characters or profession
reused in some other man who lives
probably three or so states away.
I orbit because I carry
myself heavy but not with a name that is dead or
of a dead man's but because I am set
in a recycling measured past lifetime
with an abundance of nomenclature
against numbers of people I have met
and with the dipole melancholia-by-tearing of longing
and the bridge heavy with not being
longed for—which don't mistake I am heavy with too—
of bridges and I
that the two, weighty collision
me and location, are
until I return home to coalesce. I know it is
not that crossing
that which pitch and yaw is beaming through
that is the elliptic focus of my motion
while it and I circle each other as we orbit the City,
itself a dense and begrudgingly moon-lit patch
lensing darkness among
surrounding lights,
the milk stars of the Hudson valley.
Only that the City itself is
weighted within field
of people; ugly loving haunted people and
that grid of nodes nodules points pustules
that holds hauntings our density of haunting in
that holds the refraction of the City, the prohibitive
which will not let the ghostly leave without
certain impossible haste
and our attraction or
that marks paths between wood bridge and myself
between two women from across seas eroded with
strange if sangfroid if not wholly benevolent love.
Then it must be there is nothing more soft and heavy than
figures of sand on the surface of southbound soundboard curves
pin-particles carrying our pitied aspirations I perhaps we rest still
looking out on lit windows in the City interstice from sheltered window
the stream shakes under the memorial bridge moves it thrums with passing
and I dream of the time when, by their gravity, all haunted things converge.