The spark off the boot
Makes submarine light
Wave on the track walls

A bar on the roof locks
The accordion bus
To its middle

Messengers draft
In the ambulance wake

From the eighth floor
The cars are the size
Of a four-year-old’s toys

From the twentieth
A seven-year-old
Might vroom them

When my heart hurts
I notice what’s up
With my feet

Everybody walking
Looking straight ahead

In a silence they don’t hear
Neither do I

Look down

And you end up
On the ground

The critics want the leader
Not to succumb to doubts
Just to address them

O slack rope
The metaphysics of morals is
For the birds

And do they navigate
By brain magnets?

Sunset light on the canals
And a precise ache in the wings

Until something they’ve seen before
Relaxes them

People imitate when they sing
And when they don’t

The main thing is to keep talking
And also to listen

For the song
That lasts sixty years
Or seventy

Ideas of shapeliness
Can’t be helped

A shoe on the floor
Of Grand Central Terminal

____
Jordan Davis is Poetry Editor of The Nation. His most recent publication is POD | Poems on Demand (Greying Ghost). He divides his time between New York City and southeastern Ohio.