162 City poems

Can we believe—by an effort comfort our hearts: it is not waste all this, not placed here in disgust, street after street, each patterned alike, no grace to lighten a single house of the hundred crowded into one garden-space. Crowded—can we believe, not in utter disgust, in ironical play— but the maker of cities grew faint with the beauty of temple and space before temple, arch upon perfect arch, of pillars and corridors that led out to strange court-yards and porches where sun-light stamped hyacinth-shadows black on the pavement. That the maker of cities grew faint with the splendour of palaces, paused while the incense-flowers from the incense-trees dropped on the marble-walk, thought anew, fashioned this— street after street alike. For alas, he had crowded the city so full that men could not grasp beauty, beauty was over them, through them, about them, no crevice unpacked with the honey, rare, measureless. So he built a new city, ah can we believe, not ironically but for new splendour constructed new people to lift through slow growth to a beauty unrivalled yet— and created new cells, hideous first, hideous now— spread larve across them, not honey but seething life. And in these dark cells, packed street after street, souls live, hideous yet— O disfigured, defaced, with no trace of the beauty men once held so light. Can we think a few old cells were left—we are left— grains of honey, old dust of stray pollen dull on our torn wings, we are left to recall the old streets? Is our task the less sweet that the larvae still sleep in their cells? Or crawl out to attack our frail strength: You are useless. We live. We await great events. We are spread through this earth. We protect our strong race. You are useless. Your cell takes the place of our young future strength. Though they sleep or wake to torment and wish to displace our old cells— thin rare gold— that their larve grow fat— is our task the less sweet? Though we wander about, find no honey of flowers in this waste, is our task the less sweet— who recall the old splendour, await the new beauty of cities? The city is peopled with spirits, not ghosts, O my love: Though they crowded between and usurped the kiss of my mouth their breath was your gift, their beauty, your life.

Right now, a dog tied up in the street is barking With the grief of being left, A dog bereft. Right now, a car is parking. The dog emits Petals of a barking flower and barking flakes of snow That float upward from the street below To where another victim sits: Who listens to the whole city And the dog honking like a car alarm, And doesn’t mean the dog any harm, And doesn’t feel any pity.

1 Under this Luxemburg of heaven, upright capstan, small eagles. . . . is the port of N.Y. . . . . gilders, stampers, pen makers, goldbeaters, apprehensions of thunder speed the whore indifference son glioma Tammany, McCoy, the bonze doors of the Guarantee Trust, the copper spandrels. Orangerie and game room with Old English tall twisted stem engraved goblets and Royal Copenhagen porcelain. A mutton fat jade Chien Lung bowl a toilet bottle amethyst stopper & monogram shield. A technical display. You bought a perfume bottle and a Chinese shawl. Susannah set a headstone in St. Paul. I’m inside waiting for a surprise I’m in love with the girl on the Wabash I’m alone with a hand in my hand and a pair of wonderful eyes but I’m blue I have to speak I want to do I want to see the sights obscure me the facts secure me The Maine sails out to sea the undertaker drives to Hartford Yesterday the ducks flew in a mackerel sky. I had the allotropes of vision, something historical at the controls of North America, heavyweight and metaphorical. What are the facts? they swept the city hall today they set the lathe dogs trimmed the tool posts scraped the bearings shellacked the knots, they set the capital upon the shaft. Somebody has to drive the spikes pitch the gears oil the cams somebody has to kill the whisky somebody has to speak What are the facts? 2 Inland is the goat in open field. The milk is marketed. Attend our table. The sand and fluorspar and the soda ash make a blue aventurine glass for this city, a lion rampant on his hind feet, royally clawing, tail whipped up. 3 come, great city, give us that old-time vaudeville ”During the water-movement of the French horns and the lovelace of a violin a wire from my girl, `I love you but I need a deposit.‘ Even the ventriloquist’s dummy laughed after we combed his pretty red hair and set him on his tricycle.“ Do you know the story of Sal? She was a lonely little gal with the lovelight in her eyes and Mr. H. H. at the ivories and she was happy (honest to God) In the season of Romain effects and synthetic American lights she drove into a California suburb in a high-compression gull-line Suiza rolling her Klieg eyes like revolving doors whereupon the jackass full of animal gas floated blissfully into the dance of the seven veils, yakking, ‘I have that funny feeling again, it must be love.’ Commentary: nothing so marks the copulative man as a corkscrew and a bottle opener. Question: Could you stand an old man to a cup of coffee? It’s hard walking with this silver plate in my head. Come, great city, you have full powers of attorney to protect your friends. 4 Immigrants from Warsaw move into a furnished room close to the stores under St. Chrysostom’s carillon with a porcelain pitcher and bath and hand towels on the bed rails. A new sign appears in the ground-floor window: Smocking, Hemstitching, Rhinestone Setting Our hour from here a loggia above the pepper trees a tiny cascade and vines above the bath house men and women driving on the fairway, laughing surrounded by Galloway pottery, garden furniture and white daisies. 5 When the light sprang from the sea, blowing, the window sintered and blew like Venus revealing my tenderness and many minds the way a night shot discovers a beast drinking and my responsibilities eating me as dogs eat gizzard. I saw the city changed set up like laboratory glassware, amines of herring brine, the malic acid of the sea buckthorn, glass-enclosed prescription balance, steel and agate, Fabrik Koln a physics clear as alcohol, La Vita Nuova, I hardly knew. Creditors dined at the Cliquot Club, they read the papers, trade changed. Their horses died, the big-bellied; their dogs slept in the steam heat. An ambulance with modest glass doors and a silver cross keeps night watch: A surgeon. Delicate nickel-plated instruments are laid on trays. Illuminated on the operating table naked glassblowers, gunsmiths, barbers, clerks, importers, old men from hotels, pink and tailored, naphtha-smelling Irish priests, cravat-and-boy face of the movie usher, Frankel, Shmulik, Old Country watchmakers then a white horse in the park, cigars and politics. The city wrapped in cellophane, an act-born eggshape twisted like Ugolino one sea-water, one circulatory system of man observing his magnificent urea.

I. The Day Dreamers All day all over the city every person Wanders a different city, sealed intact And haunted as the abandoned subway stations Under the city. Where is my alley doorway? Stone gable, brick escarpment, cliffs of crystal. Where is my terraced street above the harbor, Café and hidden workshop, house of love? Webbed vault, tiled blackness. Where is my park, the path Through conifers, my iron bench, a shiver Of ivy and margin birch above the traffic? A voice.There is a mountain and a wood Between us—

Welcome to Jackson: City of Grace and Benevolence City of Grace, you open, you part your curtains and smile like a hostess when we call your name, you tender what any traveler needs, a call to ease, a balm, a kindness, whatever storm. You take us in. City of Grace and Benevolence, you say you know what solace means, burned so often they called you Chimneyville, and now you can't forget, you've written it in bronze outside the City Hall the War made a hospital for the Yankee and for your Rebel sons, like the one who is always dying outside the Capitol. City of Fame, you hold him still, laurel on your crown, fan making a hand of wind to soothe his face and fill the eagle's wings spread above to promise, Virtute et armis, to say again just how far you'll go. City of Remembrance, you keep so well, you show us where Welty lived, the house still there, how she skated to the library, through the Capitol, the book now cast and open in her hands. Tell me now, City of Embrace, of the newsreels' children rounded from their march, flags gathered, the children trucked to the fairground cages, the ones who peer out through the chicken wire. City of Richard Wright and Ross Barnett, tell me not just where the Governor pled I love Mississippi, I love her people, her customs,

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead. How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.” You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

The elephants of reckoning are bunches of scruff men and women picking up thrown out antennae from the rubbish bins of the city to fix on their tubular bells and horn about by oil can fires in the freezing midnight of the old new year We ride by their music every hour in cabs on trains hearing the pit pat of our grown-wise pulse shut in shut out from the animals of the dry season the losers and boozers, we must not admit our eyes into the courtyard the whimsy of chance and our other excuses— dollars in pocket— to write beautiful songs is all I ask, God to do right with friends and love a woman and live to eighty have people listen to the story of my trip to America The elephants of reckoning are beaten and hungry and walk their solitary horrors out every sunrise slurping coffee bought with change while in some houses freedom-bound lovers embrace late and read Tagore about the people working underneath the falling of empires.

I have a word for it — the way the surface waited all day to be a silvery pause between sky and city — which is elver. And another one for how the bay shelved cirrus clouds piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea, which is elver too. The old Blackrock baths have been neglected now for fifty years, fine cracks in the tiles visible as they never were when I can I can I can shouted Harry Vernon as he dived from the highest board curving down into salt and urine his cry fading out through the half century it took to hear as a child that a glass eel had been seen entering the seawater baths at twilight — also known as elver— and immediately the word begins a delicate migration — a fine crazing healing in the tiles — the sky deepening above a city that has always been unsettled between sluice gates and the Irish Sea to which there now comes at dusk a translucent visitor yearning for the estuary.

Emotion scoops the footpath’s velvet edges, estate agents’ bluster calibrates the street’s livability, treeless, ajar with fridges bunked out. Investors wave sheets of sums to air, a tiny computer chalked on glass, loving the artist’s marble noose in adjacent pop-up gallery they might’ve forked out for, but didn’t. It was no use crying now though her vale of tears candies a conquest, with stuck name tag and good insurance that barely cost a sou. A countdown into space echoes, blue lorikeets flit the race and pigeons chew the eaves for reassurance over suckling locals and tourist dandies.

Any, every, thing that was exposed goes underground and is washed into the Tiber. This is what some people do with faces, burying. You see them, the heavy ones, chests like rivers, their heads bowed down with great antlers of thought invisible. After many seasons, the fronts of their bodies terribly developed to carry them. Venus of the Drains, the woman with the scum at the corners of her mouth who talked for a long time, scarred by burning, perilous thin, then told us we had made her day. It is seen, what should not be seen. It is I sees it. Shameful, to feel so heavily the shame of others — to hear and echo that note always waiting in the voice to be sung. Do I make it happen to her by having face and chest that wash with red?