Kirby Olson
The Next Mayor of Manhattan
“In the beginning was the Word…” John 1:1
A city can be a cube or a silo,
a shell in which inequality spirals.
Flowers propel beauty into geometry,
where the stripes of the tiger meet the zebra.
The backs of bees,
the patterns of the seas,
the parallel world of angelfish,
the pattern of a gridiron,
the shoulders of a tiger bulge
up and down. It pads through the jungle
stalking the fake gnus.
A referee’s shadow falls out of the crossword
as he thinks of Malevich’s black cross
on a white canvas,
a white hearse driving on black bricks
toward the operatic seas.
Barcodes of capitalism meet the bar codes of communism,
and the whistle of a metro train blows
as it begins a long glide into Penn Station.
Other work by Kirby Olson