Toward the end, you will notice something is missing. You will check your bird list for the Eastern Towhee, your city map for Indian restaurants, the ecological soul for greenness. You will hunt for knee socks, your Norwegian heritage, plastic soldiers. Finding nothing, you will gather energy, set all the lamps facing you, turn the AC to fifty, begin.

This is an urban poem. This is a poem about bricks, architecture, the reflective skyline. Also, Dollar General, Winn-Dixie, the BP. This is a poem about more than one bookstore, about three museums, about the grid layout of well planned streets and the color of the convention center.This is also a poem about Jupiter. I have seen Jupiter every night for twenty days. Jupiter has followed me from St. Louis to Olive Hill to Jackson to Memphis to Yellville to Gulfport. Jupiter is with me. Jupiter is the only celestial I can see because Jupiter has an apparent magnitude of -2.94, which is better than Halley’s Comet, than Fenrir, than Alpha Centauri, than Andromeda and .06 better than the faintest object visible by the naked eye, during a day when the sun is less than 10 degrees above the horizon. In other words, Jupiter is bright.

And this is a poem about brightness: the brightness of the Arch, the brightness of the bank swallows, the brightness of highway 45, the brightness of Memphis industrial center, the brightness of the backlight of my HTC inspire, the brightness of a sky with no stars.