Lee Keylock

New York City, Earth Day, April 2020

“At any given moment in the middle of a city
there's a million epiphanies occurring,
in the burning of the world beyond the curtain”

(Kate Tempest)

In the streets beyond our curtains,
the animals have come. The Red-Tailed
Hawk has left her Gramercy gargoyle
to perch on a hydrant, and baby rabbits
are crossing 5th Avenue. In Citi-Field,
a coyote roams, awaiting a crowd.
Somewhere, a peacock screams
its clown’s horn into an empty street.

A parcel of white-tailed deer drinks
from the mouth of a marble fountain
and a sturgeon basks beneath a blinding
Borealis to release her eggs. In a moonlit
Hudson, a Humpback breaches
in wake-less water calling to her pod.
Caches of acorn lids are piling
beneath traffic lights that blink
at everything, at nothing.

With a broken bottle, a striped skunk
clatters on an empty mesh bin,
her little black-and-white copies
trailing. A gaze of racoons
attempts to flip a food truck
and rats are asleep on the third rails
of subway tracks, sotted
on rotting fruit skins.

Pigeons have taken to shattering
their beaks on doors to apartment
buildings and Hell’s Kitchen
carriage horses are driving
their own heads through tarnished
collars hanging from stable doors.

In a West Side church, beyond our curtains,
a pitying of doves has built nests
beneath an altar where a single face
observes, through stained-glass, a white
boat with a red cross being circled
by vultures, waiting in the eddies.