MOONLIGHT IN THE CITY
One July evening when I was eleven,
not a block from the
waterfront,
the day
yet hot, I waited by myself in the middle
of a vacant lot and watched
as a fresh wash
of moonlight began to flow over rooftops,
and the sky beyond
dust-covered
billboards
just started to fill with clustered stars.
The splintered grids of
far-off apartment
fire escapes glittered against their backdrop
of red brick as if lit by
the flick of a switch.
In this distance, even the paired lines
of elevated train tracks,
stretching like bars
along the edge of the shore, appeared
to shine, and those
symmetrical
rows
of windows on the warehouses below
seemed almost to glow.
Warning lights
pulsed all along the span of that great
bridge over the river, as
hundreds of bright
buds suddenly stippled those rippling
waters now deepening to
the blue of a new
bruise. Steel supports wound around
one another into braided
suspension cables
dipping toward either end and glinting
beneath that constellation
still slowly
showing in the darker corridor overhead.
Already, I could see the
outlines of lunar
topography, and I thought of that old
globe my grandfather had
once given me
only days before he died—of how
I'd felt its raised beige
shapes representing
the seven continents, and of the way
he told me heâd been
to
every one of them.
Somewhere in the city, summertime
sounds÷the high
screams
of sirens
and muffled bass thumps of fireworks—
played like the muscular
backup music
pumping from some local garage band.
But I stood listlessly under
sharp-angled
shadows cast by street lamps, among
an urban wreckage of broken
cinder blocks
and glistening shards of shattered panes,
and I listened to the
wind-clank
of chain-link
fencing around that grassless plot of land,
knowing that night my father
was far away
again, driving deliveries along an interstate,
and my mother was sitting
alone at home,
as were her neighbors, awaiting the first
broadcast of a man walking
on the moon.
[ First appeared in The Greensboro Review]