“A 39 line unrhymed free verse poem in the style of John Ashbury”

In this city of partial umbrellas,  
the air swims sideways,  
overflowing with the intention  
of coffee left undrunken on the marble stoop.  
Someone is recalling a winter  
when clouds bunched near lamplight,  
ivory and uncommitted, just as now—  
the sky cleaving its attention  
between memory and precision,  
never quite arriving at either.

Traffic coils below the window  
like a ballet of old encyclopedias,  
pages splayed, hurried with purpose.  
What is it, really, that clings to the sidewalk?  
Old cigarettes? The notation of rain?  
A child’s red cap tipping forgetfulness  
past the threshold of sight,  
or the passage of that “later” everyone waits for  
with awkward newsboy shoes.

One wonders about the importance of patience—  
the way apples kept ripening  
in grandmother’s green kitchen bowl,  
each gloss of skin a small suggestion  
of something unremarkably eternal.  
It is easy to overlook,  
midway through a headline,  
how the door across the hall sighs  
when the neighbor comes home,  
weighted with late errands and thin groceries.

Let’s not call it solace,  
but rather the ingredient in distance,  
in each elevator cough and parabolic sunbeam  
curling along bookshelves and half-done puzzles.  
Nothing is ever entirely finished.  
A sock orphaned beneath a chair,  
a piano key mellow from overuse,  
the same three stories on the radio.

Sometimes, amid the ordinary disarray,  
your laughter filaments through the rooms—  
a negotiation between the table lamp  
and the idea of desire,  
something pending, restless—  
small, lovely spellings scattered on looseleaf paper  
awaiting their assembly,  
a world assembling itself, unprompted,  
while outside, someone waters their geraniums  
and the afternoon mulls over what’s next.

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