deep breath now

The tree in our shady front lawn

Sprouts white flowers at its peak,

Roots embedded in coupon catalogues

Swollen with rain and beer cans tossed

Over an unwelcome fence by street drinkers.

I gaze at it, leaning my neck

And arms over the ledge

Where my home meets the city.

Spring changes the tree,

The way night slowly and then suddenly

Changes the day,

The way a place can change a person.

I am leaving Philadelphia

With its magnolia trees crawling their way

Into the air to bear pink and purple petals

Thick with a sense of their own beauty.

I am leaving the children sweating happily

In muggy summer streets, kicking tired leather

In front of cars double parked for the past hour.

Over the tips of the elms planted in clark park

Some hundred years ago I can see the last sun

Highlighting the city, the way a farmer here two hundred years ago

Must have seen the First Bank with its marble tanning a few last minutes

Before settling down for a smoke and bed.

The snow collected the history of death here,

Where thousands couldn’t afford to both keep their heat

And buy breakfast for their kids so, school lunch

Became very important in strawberry mansion.

And the largest city park in the united states loomed

With dead cherry blossoms in the fall when

John coltrane’s old house hulked over an empty lot with

Two grills and a hundred syringes sprayed over the dirt.

And summer, oh the dangerous summer nights, sirens stirring

The humble buzz of mosquitoes, while we all stay out on our porches

Drinking pbr and jim beam until we run out

And refuse to sleep in the hot mess of youth.

But the spring in Philadelphia changes me,

The way it changes the tree in my yard,

The way my lover’s hand stirs the hairs on my chest

Like a bird, like a wind.

Philadelphia is always going away,

Struggling in a straight jacket of poverty,

Scraping its hands on the pavement

As it falls

And still forcing itself up.

Philadelphia is always here,

Old city with its rich gay artists

And apartment complexes going up

Like weeds from some other country covering the forest floor.

Philly, you are smelling like fire and the smoke that comes before,

Like perfume that’s left on sheets, like the paper in old books.

Philly I am leaving you, but I wait for you

To open me like spring, some day soon.