Soft Machinery

In the aquarium of the bus stop, rain beads the schedule board into constellations. A man with a grocery cart of basil and bolts waits as if he has borrowed the whole evening.

Under the overpass, swallows rehearse their disappearances, threading the concrete ribs with black needles. Puddles keep the sky in separate, trembling pieces; each one learns the shape of a cloud and lets it go.

The florist shuts her door by lamplight. Buckets of peonies breathe out their cold pink weather. I carry home one stem, not as a promise, but as a small insurgency against the dark.

By midnight the sidewalk has become a river that remembers every footstep without naming them. Even now, the city keeps a soft machinery of humming, and something in me turns toward it, listening.