For years I’ve walked the little city blocks
filled with houses square and oblong,
small, large, and tiny hermit crab shells

I’ve listened to the birds fill the spring morning
and evening with their songs,
and I’ve heard their echoes

There is a canopy,
a corridor of brick
and vinyl, slate,
and composite,
asphalt, grass, and concrete

Pythagorean ratios and integers
float in this air;
A Vitruvian reverberation smacks
the dome of this humid atmosphere

and rounds out all these hard lines
of living and life
and our round hermit crab shells
tighten, send us out and beyond

and into the next.