City by Judy Kronenfeld

   the gift of loneliness

            —E.B. White

 

The blur, the rush, at the hub of the expanding

universe, and then                  

the noise ground down to a purr—

the surround-cushion of it—at home  

behind your own darkening window

the you of you spurred like a flame

in your own anonymous cell

overlooking a recurrent screen

of windows: guarded, shaded, draped,

shuttered—sometimes limpid

as a smooth grey lake,

sometimes wearing the late sky

on their chests—or glowing,

but contained, or open,

yet purely black, or blank;

the dusk-blue isolation

your reward, the deep comfort                                   

of all those unseen parallel cubicles;

and then of the electric hive

clicking on lights and TVs...

As if behind velvet ropes

in a museum: all of those close,

remote, fragmented,

cordoned-off scenes.

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Judy Kronenfeld is the author of Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition,(Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize—and other poetry collections. Her poems have appeared widely, in such journals as American Poetry Journal, Calyx, Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Natural Bridge, The Pedestal, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, as well as more than twenty anthologies.