She suspected many shes in the eyes
of the rat who watched her from the edge
of the table considering the many rats
she must be thinking, even in dream.
And so a thousand memories and a thousand
more at the edge of the table in the eyes
of the rat and in the eyes of the woman
at the table considering a thousand images
of lamp-orange windows under a black city sky.
The rat imagines them too but for him they
are an enormity of yellow bricks or eyes rising
into the gray rivers between the cornices,
chimneys, and chipped racks of gargoyles
with the finger prints of their makers soot
black in laughy snarls and arms rigid as bow limbs
and knuckles where birds perch, and he feels fear.
But the city will never leave her to go wild
or free a thousand shes of smoke nor the alley
sounds millions hear like a simultaneity of clanks
and cans kicked, casket shadows from aluminum forms.
He tries to convince her of the only she, she who
passes her hands over the fence rails, she
of a thousand who sits before the leaning
nebula of delphinium at dusk waiting
for the last evening bee to light and leave
for home. “Borges,” he says, “teaches us
that the river is art and the river is time,
and so you must be the leaf, because pulling
upstream can turn the muscles of the arms
and the wet of the eyes to stone. Look now.
The evening’s gone. The city lights have dimmed.
When you wake, you’ll write your name on the wind.”
