In this version of the city, no one dares read,ragtime grows underneath Washington’s obelisk,not a monument but a threat to the clouded sky.
Next door to McCormick’s, a telescope sits,looking over the harbor, inside all of what is,for a new constellation, the hidden dancers,
a joining, convergences that come only whenSeptember moons bring heavy rains, a delugeto sound alarms to haul in the blue crabs.
In all of this we are overgrown ants, brittleon the tongue, held up above ourselves singingSouthern chants for spells to soften the hard.
What names us? I ask a man shuffling in bags,a man who knows the giant ants we have become,who knows us, but says now we have no name,
but purple iris in a golden vase over the harbor,peace wrapping itself over the…