With Your Knowing Look

What happens when this sleep outlasts us?
Brick facades will be the air. Concrete dozens.
The tar-heel stars will be quite rudimentary
then, and irrelevant, lost for comment in tufts
of automated days and contraptions of wind.

Like a rusted portico giving up noisy speech,
pale and orange in the brusseled light, so too
the city train will blink past (glowering green)
but then be shut by night. And time will stall.
Artichoke will sit on wooden stools. Grow thin.

And you, who will pick from your blond comb,
and stare at the oceanous spackle of shadow,
will be orient as gold: in Great Parks, in hot rooms,
in Pelham Bay, in the open country Transit Co.
Hushed and pocked as rose grass, you’ll rise slow.