The wind reeled up Broadway kicking a plastic bag
as high as the window cleaners at Fifty-Seventh Street, bringing hands
to lapels as hairdos slapped sideways and up.
Sunlight hit the wind,
wind fell through the light,
and everybody all of a sudden fought to hold a disassembling trapeze.
That night the wind remade itself
and shot down Third Avenue, now a black wind, clearheaded,
soaked with dark water repeatedly and repeatedly wrung out.
To walk up the street was to be rinsed,
to lean into the current and hear
its drowned voices, hear the one voice just stating the obvious.
Jana Prikryl's third book of poems, Midwood, will be published this summer. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Prikryl is an editor at The New York Review of Books.
