View from New Jersey

When you look through an empty glass
Standing on the blazing table
Out the bay window twenty feet, no more,
To the thick twist of telegraph wires
Slung around a tilting wooden pole,
The quick flick of a sparrow’s wing
Framed by Frank Sinatra Drive
And across the street to a redundant parking lot
Three portacabin toads squatting on hot asphalt
And beyond, between the blocks of
Red brick apartments built on the waterfront
Where Marlon Brando once smoked cigarettes
Now a tower of blank windows and
A million dollar look at Manhattan
Across the flat blue,
Peacock blue of the Hudson river
Where a cruise ship slides into view
At precisely the right moment,
Then further, to the opposite shore
Lined with a thin tangle of regimented green,
Rising up, the minds of a thousand
Architects made glass, fierce in the heat
Of this late July morning,
Brick shimmering to the Great Mirage of the
Empire State Building
A mile away, no less,
Thrusting its way into the heavy blue sky
Framed with an arrangement of cloud so
Perfect it becomes unnecessary to improve upon them.