1

Flanking the museum entrance are two smoke-blackened,
headless figures. Their heads were lost in the war. Their mouths
are lying open somewhere like small caves in the weeds.

Today a heavy fog rolls between the office blocks.
If the statues could speak their voices would be
like the first hairs of frost in a hard winter.

2

I am waiting on the edge of a bleak construction site
on which four zebra-striped cement mixers
are rotating smoothly, churning out

their tonnage of cement. Behind me on a billboard
a giant hamburger bun is dripping a waterfall of cheese
that coagulates in a sticky pool at the exact level
of my neck. A current of windblown leaves

splits around the glass-and-steel buildings. Hooded crows
hop sideways among flying fast-food wrappers.

From somewhere amidst the rubble the authorities
have transported the capital of a neoclassical column and
deposited it among the flowerbeds

and ornamental trees of a city park. Lonely and bullet-pocked,
it is ignored by the troupe of red-capped children
running past it, kicking through the dry leaves.

Surrounded by stripped branches, facing winter,
perhaps I should dye my hair orange. Perhaps
sorrow will rise up and disappear in my orange hair.