by Jonathan Weinert
Lawyers whistled in our fantastic city,
hailing cabs.
Our pigeons stared and massed,
as in the movies, right up to the end. I saw them
slumbering in dozens on the ledge, or brushing
folded wings together, golden-eyed, unblinking,
such that I, who flinched my eyelids down
at any shadow moving in across the harbor,
envied them, because their vision was continuous.
There’d always been the sea, of course;
we knew
in some instinctive sub-the-level-of-awareness way
the changes we both dreaded and desired
would come from that direction, but
we couldn’t have imagined how exquisite
the event would be.
Great wings
of ocean lifted up, slate against an eggshell sky,
and thrust their pinions at our city, swallowing
the piers, drowning all the low resort towns
up and down the coast. E-mails to our loved ones
went unanswered, while the phones
in several area codes went dead.
Still, downtown,
the moneyed and the unattached ate out,
rubbed elbows, brushed against each other
in the ritual reassurance of the mass, bantered
over crispy ginger salmon cake and spiced
rum confit duck with lime coulis—you’d see
a blonde attorney pausing with a half-
drained Cosmo inches from her perfect lips,
passing comment on the scarcity of mesclun
or the price of herbal tea—until
the half-expected seismic wave slammed through them,
shearing off the backs of chairs,
ripping gashes in the sheet-rocked walls,
spilling them out into the streaming streets,
their whistling and their raillery
gone dead,
eyes unblinking as martini glasses shattered
by their well-coiffed heads, released at last,
while I kept watch from thirty-seven stories up,
a hero in a Hitchcock thriller impotent
to thwart the scripted murder, lifted
out of appetite and time, thrilled and desolate
and brief, as the gray wings swiped the city,
clearing it for the ocean’s deep attention.