Everything in Sunlight I Can’t Stop Seeing

after Bruce Weigl

I fry an egg over easy, and eat it between two slices of wheat toast. Through the kitchen window I watch a workman prying up the old street. Brittle sparks jump from the brick top when he strikes it. Or it’s the shovel tip scoured to chrome bouncing off the clay. I leave my sister’s house, and the intersection transformer is still humming somehow. I’m used to the electricity quieting in the wire when the sun scrapes its knee bloody up the porch step. I walk beneath the orange fluorescent street lamps and the white fluorescent street lamps turning the air around themselves resinous with bluing rings like flooded drainage ditch ripples around dropped earrings. Tree branches, black in the dawn sky, resume their grays and browns by lunch, but the black wrought fences continue leaning into their rust, rigid and failing. —there is no war in this but me.