After “Nocturne: Trafalgar Square, Chelsea Snow” by JM Whistler, 1877

by Jack Christian 

            1.

Street scene seen in sleep
like an ecstatic state of mourning.

This blurriness we welcome.
No charge to grab or make clean.

Shoes scraping on our walk
we wish the sky well.

Shorthand grown in fog.

            2.

So what if buildings occlude the branches
beneath a finance god’s obsessive microscope?

And, what if the weather is ruined
for lack of sponsorship?

Do I keep the air that breathes me
sometimes

in the 5 minute app-for-that
practice wherein I dissolve myself?

Do I keep the noise I hear
if for a moment you think of me?

            3.
​
Street still, still life, night in need of darning,
and still this life arrived into,
usually.

            4.

Being uncertain and in love
we can’t help but wonder

what a stranger would see
in sidewalks’ anonymous,

the two of us figured
from an opposite diagonal

in a separate portrait of nothing--

no need to change our minds
nor disrupt them with epiphany.

            5.

It snows and we watch it snow.

We watch the trees until we are the trees
knowing all things telling everything

in no language out of frame.

Jack Christian is the author of two poetry collections: Family System, which won the 2012 Colorado Prize in Poetry, and Domestic Yoga, which was published by Groundhog Poetry Press in 2016. His poems have appeared in periodicals such as jubilat, Web Conjunctions, and The New York Times Magazine.