In A Border Town

In this version of the city, no one dares read,
ragtime grows underneath Washington’s obelisk,
not a monument but a threat to the clouded sky.

Next door to McCormick’s, a telescope sits,
looking over the harbor, inside all of what is,
for a new constellation, the hidden dancers,

a joining, convergences that come only when
September moons bring heavy rains, a deluge
to sound alarms to haul in the blue crabs.

In all of this we are overgrown ants, brittle
on the tongue, held up above ourselves singing
Southern chants for spells to soften the hard.

What names us? I ask a man shuffling in bags,
a man who knows the giant ants we have become,
who knows us, but says now we have no name,

but purple iris in a golden vase over the harbor,
peace wrapping itself over the city’s north border,
where horses reign over the emptied corners,

where I climb back into the old way of dancing,
wiping away the spinning-top hairdos with thick
masks over the need to be naked and breathless

so I can be freed from the one spent song.