Purple, in fact, they sprint up the length of our street
and back down through a pair of bicycle tires,
then run themselves to the ground amid the heat
of broken flag and flagstone and cement.
Sun turns them down. Air shakes them in their tiers,
correcting their posture, composing their migrant scent.

The bright albino squirrels
we saw again this morning make a sort
of couple, like Hepburn and Grant. Their last resort,
as they scramble around one another and around
their own mercurial tails,
becomes a cleft between two trunks, so dark
nobody could inspect it from the ground:

it could hold rubies, coded maps, a child.
Now that we’ve spent
a year on Fairmount Avenue, such heady sights remind
me less of balmy days in Central Park
and more of a rock star from Iceland, who lived in a tent
for a year in a climate-controlled New York apartment
in order to think of the wind, the cold, the wild.