To My Old City Poem by William Simone Di Piero

You're still there in the spectral impress,
the plied afterimage grid of trucks

and buses, diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked
on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers

from the black newsstand. Above, the trestle's
gravel bed hums expectantly, or with relief,

and the gritty pinpoints of snow, at rest
on silver rails, flare into the coming dark,

while everywhere your hungry light still tries
to reconstruct itself, charm the space

in and around the looseknit ironworks,
winter's checkered yellowings glaring past

the dark. From here, two years away, I see
in your middle distance a trestle stretched

between two brownstones, the whole scene
droning deep: the train tears through the gap,

ratcheting the space with green aquatic squares
that flick past like old sluggish film,

each frame a piece of failing, played-back fact,
and the unseen wheels click, mumble, click

in flukes of young clean snow fountaining up
around those strangers abiding in the glass.