If it’s spring in the city, have the marchers,
each one with a shrieking whistle, short-circuited the streets,
their cause as grave as the dirty cabs growling at their feet?
Is Paul Taylor at the City Center? Has my architecture-
grad-student-subtenant remembered Sting, a pet squirrel
whose appearance each May on the fire escape ledge
is as celebrated as our pink dogwood’s flowering? Privileged
as she is, eating Arabian almonds all these years, if she’s early
and hears me in the shower, she knows to come right in.
Will Joe, my Italian barber still tell me what to do in life,
reading my moods in his mirror—his razor like a fruit knife
against the peach’s flesh instead of the proud artist’s chin?
Will a burglar have borrowed my red Schwinn from the rooftop,
the rusty chain foiling a smooth delirious escape?