Root Atlas Beneath the Sidewalk

At dawn the sidewalks sweat a silver grammar, and beneath their concrete tongue white threads are writing to each other, news of rain, rust, and fallen plum skins.

The bus stop bench above them fills with strangers, coat sleeves dripping fog, phones lit like minnows; below, the patient republic of fungi passes sugar hand to hand without applause.

A maple root nudges a bottle cap, keeps it like a coin from a vanished country. Every buried thing is translated: broken glass into glint, grief into loam.

By night the streetlamps hum in amber vowels, and the whole block seems to breathe through grates. If I kneel, ear to the winter ground, I can hear the city remembering how to be a forest.