Come walk with me on this jagged concrete
where trash bags wait like sinners for confession,
workers step in tempi, late for somewhere,
and a man scowls at headlines in a kiosk.
 
We’ll stop short where a red hand tells us to
and stare at subway stairs where souls rush out
like the righteous damned harrowed from hell.
We can lament for Shakespeare and Company,
            
gone now to fast and faster food,
for peonies suffocating in a driveway,
the broken glass of a cathedral window,
the gones, insteads, the ghosts of street cafés,
 
then overlook what’s over to look up
and praise all that remains, however flawed
at the Grace Church steeple, built of marble
sent from Vermont to succeed one of wood,
            
and whiter than the ashen colored church;
at a Doric temple empty of its god;
bell tower without bell, clock without hands.
Walk under them and scan polluted skies

for a city of wholeness, distant as hope.