amid the sun's
assent each morning
when everything visible
briefly shifts
from inscrutable and dim
to explicitly
exact—
when the backlit
bricks of old, sharp-
angled buildings
blaze to relief in
the quickening temperatures
and the recondite
flight paths
of a few sparrows' shadows
snap, in mid-air,
to Euclidean circles
as, measured and lucid,
a clean, far-off
bell clangs
and cracks,
in the instant, that
ambiguous illusion
that I
and those distant rows
of smooth, ruddy buildings,
and those birds,
in their legible,
uncomplicated flight
had ever
been anything
more than
just this together:
here—
and so hungry
for our share
of the light.
