CHRISTIAN NAGLE
COIT TOWER
for
S.
Diminishing beyond floodlights, the pillar
rose like a mystic: powder-skinned; half there.
It seemed to release a breath, softening stone.
To what? Whatever, buoyed by the worldless prayer
your city had become, we thought we were.
On my striped shirt I found a hem unsewn.
Beautiful, isn’t it? From the dark bay
Alcatraz sparkled up its renaissance.
Above us, the constellations’ disarray . . .
And now a sun, folding long sleeves of shadow.
Newspapers fail the breeze, fade through our haunt’s
vacant lot. Still, that midnight chiaroscuro
recalls me, your eye’s primordial address,
one prisoner’s dream of flight, the unspoken yes.
Night clouds blind the white sclera of moon to his window.
Steam from a teacup fuzzes the pane where curtains
nearly join, where, eyes pied like a stuffed bird’s,
he stares. The artificial grip of the telescope occasionally
slides in his right palm. If not for the elm’s bare branch
clattering against the glass, it could be any season.
When the clock chimes eight, he hums a perfect fifth
against its E-flat, then stills breath, hands, until
the last note dies. Opalescent in a sheen of streetlight,
each courtyard step, each wall (even the neighbor’s shoulder
as it rolls through the specific darkness of a room
across the way) appears as a glyph on some legible scroll.
The wing of a familiar quietus enfolds him.
With an ear for the molecular, he would listen
to the tablecloth yellow in the kitchen, the family album
give up ghosts to the bookshelf, cartilege sing in his wrist.
But now, only the secret of a moon
behind clouds. Dust lights on dust along the sill.
