This brazen tangle of ferrous metal is familiar
to the city’s most well-fed pigeons, if we can judge
by the ratio of sidewalk to droppings.
W.H. Wainwright’s Wind Wheels, resurrected
from Terminal C, now spins at the edge of the intersection,
and may remind us, he suggests,
of tropical birds or butterflies, but we’ve got
actual parrots green and lonely among the sparrows.
Winters, the real city glitters west of us
though we tend to think of it as an unreachable
east: isn’t perspective always the outcome of bearings,
of what one can bear? Here, a few inches of snow
and we’re all marking territory
with traffic cones, garbage cans, a worn-out chair.
All year, the American flag ripples on the façade
of the car wash. Next to the UPS store sits Soffredo’s,
four years on the corner, resplendent
with a hand written “coming soon,” windows papered over.