Light Me Up

Listen: there's dignity in laughter—unmappable, perhaps, unintelligible as bird-calls, whale-song, but, darling, the sun this March inflected my spirit, bent the tone of you and me and the outlook on the motley grid of Manhattan. Today we are kind to ourselves. Men in coveralls, a wink at the lunch counter— somehow self-pity floats away like a scrap. I have license to observe a woman’s open-backed dress and to honor the impossible durability of a spine. Today people on the street wonder, guiltless, and unafraid, if, perhaps, they married the wrong person. It is possible; a temporary lapse in tragedy.