Song of the City at Night
Whatever hid the sun and moon inside a mountain
brought people there to found the night
where a city swans on river water
laving with light each passing wake,
mesmerizing a couple on the riverbrink.
They seem unaware what is myth
or real, taken up, as it were, by a swan’s bill
and flown to a milkwater world
where it’s possible to drink only the milk
and eat pearls. A gunshot, a siren
interrupts the quiet. Something is thrown
into the river, then the swan is mute.
To sing of this the swan would have to out-swan
itself, Sibelius out-Sibelius Sibelius.
Copyright © 2015 by Carol Frost. Used with permission of the author.
“I like this loose sonnet of mine, unrhymed but for internals, still with a strong turn in the middle of line ten. It’s part of a series of city poems that I’m working on. This poem started, I suppose, in Astoria, Queens, near Hell’s Gate Bridge. Sibelius is a favorite composer of mine.”
—Carol Frost