after Bruce Weigl
I fry an egg over easy, and eat it
between two slices of wheat toast.
Through the kitchen window I watch a workman
prying up the old street.
Brittle sparks
jump from the brick top when he strikes it.
Or it’s the shovel tip scoured to chrome
bouncing off the clay.
I leave my sister’s house,
and the intersection transformer is still
humming somehow. I’m used to the electricity
quieting in the wire when the sun
scrapes its knee bloody up the porch step.
I walk beneath the orange
fluorescent street lamps
and the white fluorescent street lamps turning
the air around themselves resinous
with bluing rings like flooded drainage ditch
ripples around dropped earrings.
Tree branches, black
in the dawn sky, resume their grays and browns
by lunch, but the black wrought fences continue
leaning into their rust, rigid and failing.
—there is no war in this but me.
