Reckoning

How to listen in the quivering space
growing around you even as the light
tips back into the night where the flights
of sparrows decend into the cramped yards
planted so long ago with a rainbow of bermuda
and forgotten plastic balls and old dogs
lost in their square divided from one another
for hundreds of miles around?

How to make the best of street lights
and alleys lain fallow with speckled flecks
of packaging and haunted bikes set crosswise
with the glare of the lights at the major
crossings gridding once wild desert and ancient
coyote trails laid and scented with generations
of pads and drug carcasses now underlain with sewers
and restaurants and dollar stores forever
changing hands and moving on and keeping
a faith that has grown empty: that growth is good.