In Love With This PLace

Beyond the starched tract homes
where I live,
fields shake out in quilts
of corn and soybeans
and on summer nights,
after the sun's red thumb snaps shut,
there begins, in that first curl of dark,
a sweet surge, a ballooning upward
of all the sweat and sediment
of the city's concrete day
and flowing in around the edges
the beginnings of an invisible tide
smelling of deep fields, flat ponds.
It swells through the streets,
flowing over lawns,
seeping through door and window screens,
gently raising the city
upward like a gigantic lily
opening on a wave of glowing coolness
until steel-anchored buildings pop
free and float. So by four A.M.
even dust sparrows and gutter pigeons
are celebrating the resurrection.