City Spring

The History of Art and Love: Talk and smoke fill the cafe. I watched only the woman's eyes Watching the torn newsprint Flagging in the thornbush beyond the window. Green claws were clutching the ghosts of events. Yesterday's hosannas impaled on a crown of thorns. But she was watching no symbols -- not even us. A slow peal of church bells And the wait between them; The poise of opinion Clappers like cold steel. Mark how the kingdom enlarges itself Like a tea about to be shaken down From the simple height of our looking. The old man in the fourth floor window. Below him: shopers, hawkers, april strollers. He pelts them, one after another, With the petals of a rose. She is witness to this circle of smoke, peal of bell, The lives of tear, rose and bush; the talk, News. . . Yet only a deep love stirs her words. She can fill the room with her ripening. And it settles like find dust over Everything. Scattered as though by careless hands The just-born leaves unwrap their Trillions of sticky, splitting eyes -- watching us.