Antigone was tipped to die, axle deep in the Milky Way, draped like a God, running out scrolls, trying the logic of a blue Toyota when they cut her off outside the Maytag depot and made the arrest. With cut lines and detonated relays, my cigarette flamed in days of riot and a general strike when dead telephones and automated teller machines hung from every alcove their dial tones flat as an odor of burning on a sun-beat market wind. I kept three pomegranates and a tortoiseshell wrought to resonance under the kitchen sink. How understanding Augustine may be likened to a state of grace, or how bright it is here, like a baptism. Or the way trains conclude, at a station you know.
Plants breathe here, their tracers hang like dreams.
In ash the radio from speech unfurled. Fences recede, submerge in a pink light long before dawn, through houses striate and dappled, dusty, like threads of cigarette smoke, space between stars. America my working draft here we are burning the college founding it anew in the city on the hill, and it cannot be hid. And it cannot be hid. And the days of your youth are the years of our glory.