[itineraries]

Two mornings back, you and I got married in the middle of a storm. We married with the making of mud, to the music of gullies gathering the corners of uneven one-way streets. Outside the courthouse, there would be a world. The same world, given to a thin veneer, stripped of acridity, and so, one newly naked to an us.

When we met it, there was no shelter. Our shirts and jackets—soaked, our pants, how they stuck to us and glistened. We laughed windshield wiper smiles, skimmed denuded trees with beaded glasses. In those hours we accrued we had been given time to forget this city as a room of roaming, restless knives.

Every city became that other city. Our city. Those were our spatchcocked pamphlets flattened under wet black wheels reeling past black cop cars parked for free in metered spaces; our brutal buildings, sky-bridged and feeding upon people’s flesh; our halfway abandoned downtown square, a bombed-out barbershop, its slanted hilltop marble steps; our pockmarked sidewalks chock with blackened disks of flattened gum.

Two mornings in and the forsythia are late. The viburnum, metronomic; the heat of March, impatient. February is a misheard name. Red-winged blackbirds hold the conversation. Someone is sleeping still. Everything revolves, is spun from one condition to the next. All flowers follow their clocks, their alarms, and weeds, their slack itineraries. Some (of each) align with our own, some we will come to mistake their shapes for revelation. The city will remind us otherwise.