Preparing to Grow

Days I walked crowded streets,

a sparrow in the ash tree

sang his light from the leaves,

then carried it out over the grasses

and into the reservoir, a preservation

of warmth in the still water.

From open storefronts, it sluiced

like a current of invitation, and how

we became a sanctuary for anyone

with a dream: women in hijab,

men in yarmulke, their children

laughing down the slides together.

Kennedy Boulevard’s traffic

ran its energy through my veins.

Jersey City’s parks—Pershing Field,

Leonard Gordon, Lincoln

and Liberty State—bristled

with maple trees, oak and birch.

Maps of heaven and its underworld

reflection, were traced in their roots

knuckled through the ground,

wriggling deeper than loam, down

past silt and clay, through granite hearts,

into the dirt and detritus of my bone.

These fingers worked me, a tillage

and fertilizing of my soil.

Sunlight seeped into the hayloft,

stored there as husk and pod, memory

of a thousand different futures.

Storm clouds massed like gray nests

woven into the east horizon. Then I woke,

to climb wooden towers, stairs winding

up arabesques inside an oak seed.

Now I stand on its carved terrace

reaching toward the first rain of history.