Dave Penny In Providence

Dave Penny 
said: I only walk
in Providence at night.

That’s when the city
looks its best,
dressed in love-crafty haze,

red eyes blinking in pairs
on the stacks of
the Narragansett Electric plant,

sign of the ghost fires still burning
in the pile of brick, signaling
how much damage there still is in the air.

I walk everywhere I can
in Providence, but only at night,
just to pay tribute to it,

to honor the dim power
cradled in this crook
of the upper Bay

where what we withhold all day
comes out
to define us.

How refined so many are by day, 
striding these cobblestones
in good artist’s clothes, admiring

the East Side brick,
avoiding the South Side, 
slumming in Olneyville,

dipping their well-shod toes
into the Armory district, feeding
their faces on Federal Hill.

They remind themselves of this at night,
overstate the light, recall that 
“Providence” is a name once given

to the source of good fortune,
cling to that.  But I walk the city
at night not to fear but to bathe in the hangover

of the once-rough port, the vanishing villainy 
of the Mob, the elder deities
once conjured here; to imagine

their red eyes blinking at me
at night in Providence, city
of disguises, city that was once

and always will be
my only comfortable
home.  Some of us, after all,

do our best work
in the dark
when we can almost touch 

what we refuse to acknowledge
by day — when we can at last find
others who know who we are

simply because
we all feel at home
in this rough, honest night.