May 7, 2013

the day as sidewalk

It will come upon you like the corner quadrant where goose droppings
mingle with gum wrappers and the straw from a Frappuccino
consumed that first afternoon it became warm enough for shorts.
Some anonymous someone will have ground out their cigarette in the crack
the superstitious kids step over. All of it will look quite mangled and gloomy,
ripe for erasure and and a do-over with a pouring of hot asphalt.
So you will bear down, fold in at the knees and shrink - unsuccessfully -
into someone less susceptible, hoping, simply, to make your way through.
And then, almost missable, a faint etch of two initials with a plus sign between them.
It is a stitch, a scar line, a wink, a map.