162 City poems

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty— Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; —Till elevators drop us from our day ... I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene Never disclosed, but hastened to again, Foretold to other eyes on the same screen; And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced As though the sun took step of thee yet left Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,— Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning, A jest falls from the speechless caravan. Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks, A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene; All afternoon the cloud flown derricks turn ... Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still. And obscure as that heaven of the Jews, Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow Of anonymity time cannot raise: Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show. O harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry, Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path—condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms. Under thy shadow by the piers I waited Only in darkness is thy shadow clear. The City’s fiery parcels all undone, Already snow submerges an iron year ... O Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod, Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

2001 Sadness of just-painted rooms. We clean our tools meticulously, as if currying horses: the little nervous sash brush to be combed and primped, the fat old four-inchers that lap up space to be wrapped and groomed, the ceiling rollers, the little pencils that cover nailheads with oak gloss, to be counted and packed: camped on our dropsheets we stare across gleaming floors at the door and beyond it the old city full of old rumors of conspiracies, gunshots, market crashes: with a little mallet we tap our lids closed, holding our breath, holding our lives in suspension for a moment: an extra drop will ruin everything.

Like the horn you played in Catholic school the city will open its mouth and cry out.Don't worry 'bout nothing. Don't mean no thing. It will leave you stunned as a fighter with his eyes swelled shut who's told he won the whole damn purse. It will feel better than any floor that's risen up to meet you. It will rise like Easter bread, golden and familiar in your grandmother's hands. She'll come back, heaven having been too far from home to hold her. O it will be beautiful. Every girl will ask you to dance and the boys won't kill you for it. Shake your head. Dance until your bones clatter. What a prize you are. What a lucky sack of stars.

As fresh garbage is. As dirt sucked out of a fingernail. As a wall clean of prostitutes. When I am this I am at the mercy of my nakedness. A pillar of undress whose power I do not know how to wield. I watch porn. I study the geometry of limbs splayed. Not the moan but the angle of a moan. I swallow. In this way I am a thief. Sometimes I forget my body & go untouched until I am touched & scream. Sometimes I want to eat my breasts down to their bitter rind & spit them out. I want to be the bitter rind without suck and easily thrown. Easily thrown I want to be the pebble thumbed & wished upon before enveloping the lake I sink in. I sink in you the lake & by lake I mean gutter a water that does not hold me well. Here we are not the bodies our mothers made. If you are to hold me hold me as a gun. Grip me & profit the dark. The unattended purse. The pair of heels darting from us in dull claps sharpening against the concrete as teeth against a stone.

The garments worn in flying dreams were fashioned there— overcoats that swooped like kites, scarves streaming like vapor trails, gowns ballooning into spinnakers. In a city like that one might sail through life led by a runaway hat. The young scattered in whatever directions their wild hair pointed, and gusting into one another, fell in love. At night, wind rippled saxophones that hung like windchimes in pawnshop windows, hooting through each horn so that the streets seemed haunted not by nighthawks, but by doves. Pinwheels whirled from steeples in place of crosses. At the pinnacles of public buildings, snagged underclothes— the only flag—flapped majestically. And when it came time to disappear one simply chose a thoroughfare devoid of memories, raised a collar, and turned his back on the wind. I closed my eyes and stepped into a swirl of scuttling leaves.

(As Distinguished by an Italian Person of Quality) Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare, The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square; Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there! Something to see, by Bacchus, something to hear, at least! There, the whole day long, one's life is a perfect feast; While up at a villa one lives, I maintain it, no more than a beast. Well now, look at our villa! stuck like the horn of a bull Just on a mountain-edge as bare as the creature's skull, Save a mere shag of a bush with hardly a leaf to pull! —I scratch my own, sometimes, to see if the hair's turned wool. But the city, oh the city—the square with the houses! Why? They are stone-faced, white as a curd, there's something to take the eye! Houses in four straight lines, not a single front awry; You watch who crosses and gossips, who saunters, who hurries by; Green blinds, as a matter of course, to draw when the sun gets high; And the shops with fanciful signs which are painted properly. What of a villa? Though winter be over in March by rights, 'Tis May perhaps ere the snow shall have withered well off the heights: You've the brown ploughed land before, where the oxen steam and wheeze, And the hills over-smoked behind by the faint gray olive-trees. Is it better in May, I ask you? You've summer all at once; In a day he leaps complete with a few strong April suns. 'Mid the sharp short emerald wheat, scarce risen three fingers well, The wild tulip, at end of its tube, blows out its great red bell Like a thin clear bubble of blood, for the children to pick and sell. Is it ever hot in the square? There's a fountain to spout and splash! In the shade it sings and springs: in the shine such foambows flash On the horses with curling fish-tails, that prance and paddle and pash Round the lady atop in her conch—fifty gazers do not abash, Though all that she wears is some weeds round her waist in a sort of sash. All the year long at the villa, nothing to see though you linger, Except yon cypress that points like death's lean lifted forefinger. Some think fireflies pretty, when they mix in the corn and mingle, Or thrid the stinking hemp till the stalks of it seem a-tingle. Late August or early September, the stunning cicala is shrill, And the bees keep their tiresome whine round the resinous firs on the hill. Enough of the seasons,—I spare you the months of the fever and chill. Ere you open your eyes in the city, the blessed church-bells begin: No sooner the bells leave off than the diligence rattles in: You get the pick of the news, and it costs you never a pin. By and by there's the travelling doctor gives pills, lets blood, draws teeth; Or the Pulcinello-trumpet breaks up the market beneath. At the post-office such a scene-picture—the new play, piping hot! And a notice how, only this morning, three liberal thieves were shot. Above it, behold the Archbishop's most fatherly of rebukes, And beneath, with his crown and his lion, some little new law of the Duke's! Or a sonnet with flowery marge, to the Reverend Don So-and so, Who is Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Saint Jerome and Cicero, "And moreover," (the sonnet goes rhyming,) "the skirts of Saint Paul has reached, Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more unctuous than ever he preached." Noon strikes,—here sweeps the procession! our Lady borne smiling and smart With a pink gauze gown all spangles, and seven swords stuck in her heart! Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife. No keeping one's haunches still: it's the greatest pleasure in life. But bless you, it's dear—it's dear! fowls, wine, at double the rate. They have clapped a new tax upon salt, and what oil pays passing the gate It's a horror to think of. And so, the villa for me, not the city! Beggars can scarcely be choosers: but still—ah, the pity, the pity! Look, two and two go the priests, then the monks with cowls and sandals, And the penitents dressed in white shirts a-holding the yellow candles; One, he carries a flag up straight, and another a cross with handles. And the Duke's guard brings up the rear, for the better prevention of scandals: Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife; Oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in life!

Even though it’s May & the ice cream truck parked outside my apartment is somehow certain, I have a hard time believing winter is somehow, all of a sudden, over —the worst one of my life, the woman at the bank tells me. Though I’d like to be, it’s impossible to be prepared for everything. Even the mundane hum of my phone catches me off guard today. Every voice that says my name is a voice I don’t think I could possibly leave (it’s unfair to not ask for the things you need) even though I think about it often, even though leaving is a train headed somewhere I’d probably hate. Crossing Lyndale to meet a friend for coffee I have to maneuver around a hearse that pulled too far into the crosswalk. It’s empty. Perhaps spring is here. Perhaps it will all be worth it. Even though I knew even then it was worth it, staying, I mean. Even now, there is someone, somehow, waiting for me.

1 Adrift in the middle of my years, I sit in a corner and drink. I eavesdrop a tableful of girls romancing their cell phones, workshopping love’s abstract particulars, while football plays on the big screen; I listen like a thief in case the women know the score. But I never could tell. At fulltime I walk home like a motherless child. 2 Witness is a solitary game. There isn’t a thing I have left to say but back in my room I ring like a singing bowl, empty and unable to stop. You’re in nine kinds of pain, my friend; you know the twenty-seven strains of despair. And your lovely hair has fallen. The moon at my window is a rusted shot, caught in its corrupt trajectory down. 3 The world was always someone else’s oyster, a metaphor I never could prise open. All I’m good for tonight is to let the night pass, while beyond me the world peters and my friend fights beautifully like a trout on god’s line. The usual idiots are still in power. But they’ll keep.

The sun slides down behind brick dust, today’s angle of life. Everything melts, even when backbones are I-beams braced for impact. Sequential sledgehammers fall, stone shaped into dry air white soundsystem of loose metal under every footstep. Wrecking crews, men unable to catch sparrows without breaking wings into splinters. Blues-horn mercy. Bloodlines. Nothing but the white odor of absence. The big iron ball swings, keeping time to pigeons cooing in eaves as black feathers float on to blueprint parking lots.

The householder issuing to the street Is adrift a moment in that ice stiff Exterior. ‘Peninsula Low lying in the bay And wooded—’ Native now Are the welder and the welder’s arc In the subway’s iron circuits: We have not escaped each other, Not in the forest, not here. The crippled girl hobbles Painfully in the new depths Of the subway, and painfully We shift our eyes. The bare rails And black walls contain Labor before her birth, her twisted Precarious birth and the men Laborious, burly—She sits Quiet, her eyes still. Slowly, Deliberately she sees An anchor’s blunt fluke sink Thru coins and coin machines, The ancient iron and the voltage In the iron beneath us in the child’s deep Harbors into harbor sand.