Ernest Yates

Construction Site

Market Street is minus
one eyesore. Discolored stucco

walls have disappeared,
uprooted,
collapsed by the wrecking ball.
What code
articulating
what cabala

has replaced the old
graffiti?
I peer through a gap

in the closed picket fence
at beams, at gravel,
at a concrete bed;
through the fence, through the caterpillar,
through the slum, through the mall,

the unconstant city;
through all
the transformations the eternal
disunity.