Binghamton

          April 3, 2009

It’s not hard to remember
her through the television
snapshots—the congressional
church on Main looking out
along the strip of chicken 
joints and the red brick high school.
Everything needing
a good scrub from the salty
winters, industrial closings, 
her sad desire to be reborn.

A thousand miles away, 
and everyone’s saying her name 
like I never left, like she is sitting
on my porch again, 
fingering the mimosa she killed
in its clay pot.  I can almost touch her
even here, in this Southern city,
where the bushes turn twenty
shades of pink in February
and the deafening grey 
of the rainy season is but a bluster
of winter and then the pirouetting
spring.  

It’s as blue today in Mississippi
as it was that September in New York
when the great beasts of those buildings
skinned themselves to ash.
I stared out my window that day too, 
looking at her in the backyard, 
the thistle crinkling violet on the green.
A cat rolled and rolled in my garden, 
turned up its newly brown body
and hopped the fence.  

That’s most of what I remember of that day,
and I look at my own cats now,
chasing each other in and out
of my car’s tires and wonder if this
is how I’ll see her now— 
the vested police with their long guns,
a blockade of lights and firearms.
My one loved city reduced 
to headlines, her proximity
from New York. And me so useless
and distant, wanting nothing
but a home to cradle her in.

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