Lessons From The City

The sky is teaching the city
about the smell of urine drying,
about other things:
like compost, and fresh roasted coffee;
like rotted squab; like tobacco.
With every withheld raindrop the
lesson grows and the city learns
it.

The sun is teaching the city heat
and the fog is a tutor for each gray
green, mauve, marble, and white in its
soft pallet. And from the earth, the city
is learning anticipation, and to brace
before a fall.

And each footfall is a lesson in rhythm;
each note another harmony, point,discord,
And the sky is all this time
still teaching, with wind that hums with
horns and bird sounds and shouts and
rattles windows and still bears not one hint
of rain but only of fog, of the clouds descending
to touch and tease and never give up their
water.

And the bay is teaching the city loneliness
and it is teaching the city how to wake up in the
mourning groggy and tousled and the city
is learning.

Is learning from the sun how to bend light, how to
warm and cool in stark and shade.  It is learning
the meaning of labyrinth and of walking away, and
about seeing what can clean and heal
and feeling it, and touching it, and still it will not rain,
it will not.

The city is learning to bend light around them, and
to fill up their bodies with its dust and its clouds
and its tobacco and rot.  And it has learned from music
and discord to hide their sulfurs--each a new shade and
texture--in the collage of other human odors. And it
is passing all its lessons, lessons of how not to see
and how to remember without having been there and
what way to smile when hurting, or doing harm.

And if the rain comes, what lesson will the sky
then teach? Will it teach forgetting or fulfilling?  Will it
teach another softer rhythm, or beat once with thunder
and flood.