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Tonight there’s a mirror on the sidewalk, leaning on the steps of the cathedral. I want to think it’s a work of art, or at least an intentional gesture: anyone passing can see, reversed here, the rooftop Virgin’s golden face ringed by lightbulbs, looking up toward us. A few blocks down the searchlights revolve atop some office tower’s steely sheen. Where would they lead us, these beacons that sweep the dark and cut the steam billowing from the stacks, so the sudden sections of cloud tremble in stunning and troubled currents? I have a friend who sometimes sells everything, scrapes together enough money to get into the city, and lives on the streets there, in the parks. She says she likes waking knowing she can be anyone she wants, keep any name as long as it wears well. She stayed with one man a few days; calling themselves whatever they liked or nothing, they slept in the park beneath a silver cloth, a “space blanket” that mirrored the city lights, and the heat of his dog coiled between them would warm them. I knew, she says, I was in heaven. Isn’t that where those beams washing and disguising the stars have always us: the anonymous paradise, where there isn’t any telling how many of these futures will be ours? It was enough to be warmed by steam blurring the café windows, to study how grocers stacked the wet jewels

No remembering now When the apple sapling was blown Almost out of the ground. Not telling how, With all the other trees around, It alone was struck. It must have been luck, He thought for years, so close To the house it grew. It must have been night. Change is a thing one sleeps through When young, and he was young. If there was a weakness in the earth, A give he went down on his knees To find and feel the limits of, There is no longer. If there was one random blow from above The way he's come to know From years in this place, The roots were stronger. Whatever the case, He has watched this tree survive Wind ripping at his roof for nights On end, heats and blights That left little else alive. No remembering now... A day's changes mean all to him And all days come down To one clear pane Through which he sees Among all the other trees This leaning, clenched, unyielding one That seems cast In the form of a blast That would have killed it, As if something at the heart of things, And with the heart of things, Had willed it.