Andropogon

The Empire State Building rises on the clouds
like a Dadaist syringe, an electric tine
from the ice gray palisades. The rest is coming.

But for now, a train that jitters through a brace
of rusted bridgework stops mid-vault
where river iron shines below a sun-swiped
foundry and its sleeping dinosaur of coal,

its diagonal conveyor track that holds me from
the fault of the horizon, confines me on the meadow,
in this window where my beard is coming in for fall.