Portrait
in Bushwick, figures silhouetted behind me
in a Gaussian blur.
Green lasers constellate across my face
in shapes that I would later try to trace
as if the answers were in them bound,
could be found in the empty spaces
between one plotted point
and the random, verdant next.
I am making an expression
that I have never made again,
or it could be that it was
the light itself, meant to find me once
and not once more.
I had just turned twenty-six,
which at the time felt singular,
different from the year before
and the one before that
when I stood on a curb
watching a boy bike off into the night
without a light or helmet,
confident he was fated to die
young and beautiful.
That fall, an early snow swept through the city,
frosting the tips of the shrubs that lined
the sidewalks of Rivington Street
like little rows of boy band armies.
Things were different then,
the way they always are
before they change:
Same light. Same air.
Same wind that proves the skin
that separates the outside
from within, gleam of stars
that pulls me toward a past
I can’t yet see,
whose light is still
unwinding, not yet found its way
to Earth.