Transcendence

most nights she swirled above Manhattan in a long graceful dance but now she sat in a village club as jazz filled it with a sonorous melody aromatizing the crowded tables she played the clarinet and sang swing songs as the audience sat enraptured her beauty overwhelming the small space

and afterwards she left and walked along the docks playing to the Hudson and to the ships passing up the river

in Brooklyn the graffiti swallowed a schoolyard and a section of the expressway she moved like a gazelle through the maze of projects on a moonless night the city frozen in sleep

she rode the subway cranking over the Manhattan Bridge to the empty shops in Chinatown dawn breaking over the cracked sidewalks and tenements bodegas and coffee shops pulling up their steel sheds and the dull sound of the morning drifted into the streets

Suzanne, living in the night lit a cigarette that glowed in the sunlight sighing, she fell asleep