Blue States

An Islamic sliver of moon rises—a scythe without a hammer
in the Indian-corn blue sky of early evening.
She knows the sky’s portents &
walks around with her eyes painted on her closed eyelids
selling yellow Sunday newspapers from summers ago
while Italian lights shine nostalgia from storefront windows.

New England liberals pass in sweaters and pea coats
dragging their children trough cafes and shopping malls
having wrapped them in heavy coats and long scarves
as if dragging them in from some infinite expanse or
streaming them through blue cathode tubes.

Earlier, on a fall afternoon
she slept a dreamless sleep in the warmth
of the reading window at the Brookline Public Library—
The Nation crumpled in the lap of her wool coat.
Her bones ache, though the dank of summer has left them.
And despite what her body knows,
her mind is stilled
the sky being so blue, so cold and cloudless.

The world has nothing to reveal to us now.
No, like a scarf or a cold gust of autumn leaves
she envelops us
repeating all other leaves and blues;
plunging us back from some infinite expanse.

And far, not too far from the frozen plasma images
of football and presidents and insurgencies
she bums a cigarette &
lights the night’s first
in a blue nicotine glow.
And in the freeze frame of the match’s sulfur light
in the smoky delta haze of chemical haze lifting
or far away in the penetrating silence before a roadside bomb,
before the scuttling of daughters & sons
before the maiming of sisters & brothers
on the night after the holiday,
not long after she’s taken her things & left;
you can hear gently streaming
the watery soul of America
from smoldering cigarettes & broken televisions
through streets littered with fallen leaves & newspapers.