To My Old City

By W. S. Di Piero b. 1945

You’re still there in the spectral impress,

the plied afterimage grid of trucks

and buses, diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked

on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers

from the black newsstand. Above, the trestle’s

gravel bed hums expectantly, or with relief,

and the gritty pinpoints of snow, at rest

on silver rails, flare into the coming dark,

while everywhere your hungry light still tries

to reconstruct itself, charm the space

in and around the looseknit ironworks,

winter’s checkered yellowings glaring past

the dark. From here, two years away, I see

in your middle distance a trestle stretched

between two brownstones, the whole scene

droning deep: the train tears through the gap,

ratcheting the space with green aquatic squares

that flick past like old sluggish film,

each frame a piece of failing, played-back fact,

and the unseen wheels click, mumble, click

in flukes of young clean snow fountaining up

around those strangers abiding in the glass.

Source: The Dog Star (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990)

Biography

W.S. Di Piero was born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and earned degrees from St. Joseph’s College and San Francisco State College. A poet, essayist, art critic, and translator, Di Piero has taught at institutions such as Northwestern University, Louisiana State University, and Stanford, where he is professor emeritus of English and on faculty in the prestigious Stegner Poetry Workshop. Elected to the American Academy of . . .

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