The Same Sound Every Night

Am I elegant and unemployed? Yes,
and this season is meant for my looking
out from rooftops, for spreading out on
a picnic blanket myself. I cut through
the park carrying a bag of tangerines,
a carton of blueberries that would be
expensive back home. I can walk around
here all day eating fruit, watching various
creatures approach their warren, their
burrow at homecoming up the escalator
to buses with broken headlights. The long
commute home is compelled by some
instinct I have not yet cultivated.

Certainty was supposed to come on
the evening of Manhattanhenge. My
friend called and said I should be able
to see the sun from where I was.
An epiphany is something that happens
to you when the sunset lines up with
the street grid. I couldn’t find the horizon,
though I walked fast until the warehouses
turned gray at the north tip of Greenpoint.
Time is titanic; it is night already and
the neighborhood kids go on kiwi-eating
as I walk home. Music plays, but
the lights are out—a circuit is blown
and I still hear the same sound every night.
I aspire to heal bruises with oranges
alchemically, alone as if I am
the only unpossessable and blue one.