Two Blocks

Two Blocks

Six minutes:
I shave heels along discolored concrete,
pass glutted bins, glance
at the homeless shoveling like a miner
with hands he later raises in praise
where there are no diamonds;
skip the post office whose
flag I see from my bathroom window
wielding its memo—
that ancient schemes persevere;
behind me
sirens hush reaching the trauma center;
on the corner a drugstore,
once a market, opens the door;
dead pigs bounce on the shoulders
of white coat butchers;
in the small park, the hopeful
curve morning bodies into breathing;
the beige building
in eleven three seventy-three
once housed a stranger whose life
I privately trailed, we could
have been little allies, unloosening
the lonely that gripped childhood,
she had the smile I liked,
teeth like pillars unshaken
by hurricane winds, maybe we did
share the sidewalk as kids,
when did her mother die,
I ask daily during
the two-block trip to my train,
she floods my life in this way, dearly,
though the smallness of separation
brings me to a poisonous kin;
before seven a.m., a man stands
outside his apartment, near the tea shop
eating a ripened mango fully peeled,
holding the fruit away
between unclean bites,
inconvenienced by its blood dripping,
weighing heavier
than its sweet, unforgiving flesh