Cities & Urban Life

Here we are
in our doughboys and camos, our doughty frocks
with drips of bitter on the sleeve, our passions revving
their pulp to pittance at a gas station
in the city that never peeps —

We don’ t get any too much light;
It’ s pretty noisy, too, at that;
The folks next door stay up all night;
There’ s but one closet in the flat;
The rent we pay is far from low;
Our flat is small and in the rear;
But we have looked around, and so
We think we’ ll stay another year.

OUR PATRON OF FALLING SHORT,
WHO BECAME A PRAYER

Thousands of planes were flying and then
they stopped. We spend days moving our eyes

across makeshift desks, we sit on a makeshift floor;
we prepare for almost nothing that might happen.

Early on, distant relations kept calling.
Now, nothing: sound of water

tippling a seawall. Nothing: sparks
lighting the brush, sparks polishing the hail,

the flotsam of cars left standing perfectly still.
Thud of night bird against night air,

there you are on the porch, swath
of feathers visible through the glass,

Surfeit of distance and the wracked mind waiting,
nipping at itself, snarling inwardly at strangers.
If I had a car in this town I'd
rig it up with a rear bumper horn,
something to blast back at the jackasses
who honk the second the light turns green.
If you could gather up all the hornhonks
of just one day in New York City,
tie them together in a big brassy knot
high above the city and honk
them all at once it would shiver
the skyscrapers to nothingness, as if
they were made of sand, and usher

The cold transparent ham is on my fork —
It hardly rains — and hark the bell! — ding-dingle —
Away! Three thousand feet at gravel work,
Mocking a Vauxhall shower! — Married and Single
Crush — rush; — Soak’ d Silks with wet white Satin mingle.
Hengler! Madame! round whom all bright sparks lurk
Calls audibly on Mr. and Mrs. Pringle
To study the Sublime, & c. — (vide Burke)

The child’ s assignment:
“What is a city?”
All dusk she sucks her pencil
while cars swish by
like ghosts, neighbors’ radios
forecast rain, high clouds,
diminishing winds: at last
she writes: “The city is everyone.”
Now it’ s time
for math, borrowing and exchanging,
the long discipleship
to zero, the stranger,
the force that makes us

It ends badly, this glass of wine,
before you drink it
you have to drink a prior glass,
before you sip you gulp,
before you chug the bottle
you pour it down your throat,
before we lie together
naked, we divorce, before we rest
we grow old, it ends in chaos,
but it is delicious,
when we wake it is the past,
we are the faces staring
from the high lit window,
the unmet lovers, the rivals
who do not exist,
united in a radiance
that will not fade at dawn.

On Christmas Day, Kathleen and I
propel a raft with plastic spoons
through the hissing fur of surf,
stirring as we go
an Alka-Seltzer sun.

We pass Bolinas-Stinson School,
the fire house, and Smiley's dive;
extinguished geodesic domes
along the mesa road
where Cream Saroyan lives.

It's not exile, homes and families behind
us, where we meet. It happens anywhere,
now: a stateless
state of no name, quietly seceding
from the crumbling empires round us,

without stamps or Eurovision entries.
No-one does it with a rough guide in a week.
You inhabit it
or nothing. Like this: in a pavement cafe
you blink and you seem to surprise them,