NEW YORK, FOURTH OF JULY

The yellow cabs in your black neighborhood
streak by like mustard on a hot dog,
full of the juice of gasoline. You climb the stairs
and the thirty-fifth floor of your
high-rise with its elevator laid low is,
for one night only, the best place to be.
The sky’s gunpowder-plotted astrological chart
has your stars in the ascendant, going off
with paparazzi flashes of promise.
The Chrysler building, its lights like spilt milk,
blasts upwards over Midtown, failing to launch;
a rocket with its touch-paper keystone
held for a moment, then another and another,
by the car lights along 43rd and Lex.

The cab driver’s name is Monplaisir,
and you tip him five bucks for the pleasure
it gives you. A quarter to nine on the Fourth of July:
from Flushing Meadows to Bryant Park, from the East
to the Hudson rivers, fireworks flash against the canvas
of the dark, abstract expressions of something
just beyond your grasp. Well, reach up,
catch them as they fall. The crowd’s roar drums
tinnitus in your ears. Lights fountain down,
the sieved rays of multicolored suns. Let them come.
Walk the sidewalks, be among people,
smell the cordite, sift the night for the one
who was sucked through the eye of a needle,
a hole in the sky, from your life. The light of your life.