There are gods here

I imagine them and sketch wild figures in the margins of my notebook

savage eyes that peer from behind cardboard boxes,

light-limbed ghosts high in the bitter air, with the city lights shining golden stars far beneath

their misty toes.

trees that walk, groaning knotted bark, turning with slow-moving ponderous steps, each footfall

decades of slow movement

voices in water, haunting an old man's dreams since childhood, never quite remembered

enough to speak of.

and they nest like birds in the swaying shoes that hang from telephone lines

and they twist and dance in the whorl of tattered leaves and candy-wrappers that live and

move on the cold and salted pavement.

they den in the wind-sheltered courtyards and corridors between buildings, and rustle the tree-tops

at night, in joy at the colorful brightness of the strings of christmas lights

they sleep in the dark dirt and water-seeping grime of forgotten basements.

they wash their red hands under flickering florescent tubes and tons of steel and brick, in the

gleaming pastel-tiled basement bathroom of a high school- at night, when it is quiet

and echoing in the dusky hallways.

they are pallid-skinned men hovering in an alleyway, watching hungrily

they are brick walls that glow golden in the fading sun like the cliffs over a faraway river, I

remember from so long ago.

lulled by the wheels, I dream of a city that is not this one.