Literary interlude

Mass Cards #17

As to what

                        is left

that is our only

way home over what is already gone

to a painted head

of Alexander Hamilton

                                    hanging

inside clouds about the falls

on the walls of a cartoon bank

            our way out

of not knowing what body is missing

to restore nothing that can be named

as they are a prayer, no longer left to us

and all that might be sun in late November

glowing gold and crimson in the bend of a

few trees singing with birds on Cianci Street

and feel the warmth on this window

just heating up before a road to St. Michael’s

            church

the screens of the jail and a star a thousand

years above Paterson

—Michael Reardon

From the anthology A Place Like Paterson, edited by June Avignone, Lincoln Springs Press, 1992