Theresa’s Blue Alien

The Pleiadian steps from the gutter's edge,
skin the exact shade of a bruise that never heals,
neither cobalt nor indigo but the precise blue
of a page left blank too long. He moves through
the avenues after the last elevator has settled
and the bodegas have locked their neon green
fluorescent eyes. Streetlamps hold their breath.
No taxis. No footsteps but his own, soft as the turning
of a chapter no one has written yet. He is the figure
the novel keeps returning to, not the hero, not the villain,
only the quiet hinge on which every scene swings open
and closed. His passage rearranges the residual heat
of vanished conversations: a dropped receipt,
a half-smoked cigarette still warm in the grate,
the faint grease of fingerprints on a old, used
payphone
that no longer rings. Between the stone ribs of the
 buildings
he gathers what the night has abandoned,
the echo of a key in a lock three blocks away,
the slow drip from a fire escape that counts
itself in syllables. Each detail enters him
the way ink enters paper, permanent, unread.
He does not look upward. The Pleiades
are irrelevant now. He is already inside the pages
of the book,
walking its empty margins, blue and necessary,
the only living clause in a sentence that ends
when the first morning NYC bus turns the corner.