Royal Mile, Cold Evening

The sky pink and gray from crying,
the street awash with characters,
hurrying, jacketed. No medium sufficient
for them, no long enough stretch of white page.

The drizzle turning to sleet-drizzle,
the gimmicky tea-houses swelling
light suggestively into the dim
matrices of the streets. Car horn, then silence.

A woman with pink eyeliner, lead by
her elbow by an earnest-looking man,
is sobbing at embarrassing volume.
They disappear into a bright door that shuts.

An executive of some old forgotten school
of gentlemanly banking, with white hair
bundled around his collar, opens an umbrella,
looking across the street with clear-

eyed confidence. Such orbs unto themselves.
Such curved globes of held complexities.
Not far below, two children in black
shamelessly kiss in the wet grass of the park,

under half-stripped trees that mull to themselves
gently on detached thoughts. Somewhere
wine glasses touch. Somewhere else a pigeon
startles onto air, scattering drops and moltage.

The Peter-Pan house fronts age from gray-pink
to red-gray, a bell jars out, announcing
the implausible time. So dark already?
So dark, yes, and so much lost tonight to art.

10.26.09