LINES FROM A PARKING LOT


High rises lit and draped in the royal robes of dusk,
the cars crawling as usual toward the bridge along the Skyway
and me wondering, how is it that I came to see this vision?

Low blood sugar? A synapse jumping contradiction
into living metaphor? Surely it must be the spirit of Blake
showing me an angel in every lighted window.

A background of gigantic facades decorated in the jewelry
of electricity. A double string of lights moving slowly
in the foreground, one stranded red, the other white.

Fascinated, I watch a van maneuver the lot across the cyclone.
Compacts run on four cylinders, but people on a single heart
in a world of dead batteries and myocardial infarction.

My hand on the handle of the door, I tell myself, get in;
feel the ungrounded current volting through fingertips.
The windows reveal earth movers level after a job well done.


--David Joseph