A Rainbow in New York

I came to ask her to marry me

brought a ring with a viscid ice-clump diamond

and for myself, a wet bag of onion rings, salty,

voluminous.

•

For a while I couldn’t find the entrance

to Central Park but the shadow of a child’s bicycle,

bearing a small white flag at the rear like an unassailable standard

led me on.

•

Zesty yellow lines of cars wished me good luck

as did the child’s mother clucking at my errant plimsolls

in the mid-winter snow with only the kind of light now

that follows an eclipse:

nascent, dimmed, tentative in its comeback.

•

There were trees from which

powder

drops delicately.

•

I snapped green ducks in flight on my phone.

I snapped an empty baseball field placid in white.

Even the wind tasted of birthday cake.

I felt my fingers between bronze plated coins.

•

Picturing this moment I’d had more breakdowns than the highway service.

Picturing this place, I found a created space more sacred than civility.

Like these chipped mottled trees are some unacknowledged godmother.

She was waiting, her jacket pure cinnamon with a liquorice chaser

her eyes, mint toothpaste

her hat charred duck

her gloves, more liquorice.

•

Her hair was Regent’s canal in the summer, her smile

warm tacos at the stand.

•

All I had left was the smell of my magenta passport,

adrenaline.