the Senses Sleep
CHAPBOOKS
O City
What Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse)
TRANSLATIONS
I Don’t Believe in Ghosts, by Moikom Zeqo
EDITED BOOKS
Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Works of a 20th Century Master
(with Takako Lento)
New European Poets (with Kevin Prufer)
This book is for my parents, who first took me to the City and for Harper Elyse, who will inherit it
. . . they pushed on, raised the flag of the Word Upon lawless spots denied or forgotten By the fear or the pride of the Glittering City . . .
—W. H. AUDEN
the city that wakes every hundred years and looks at itself in the mirror of a word and doesn’t recognize itself and goes back to sleep . . .
—OCTAVIO PAZ
Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard.
—ITALO CALVINO
A PRAYER (O CITY—)
O arrow landed deep in Harold’s eye—
O voice
pressing upward against the sky—
O light and steam.
(When the western windows
of the City go pink, the rooms behind them
lock shut with clouds.)
O clouds—
(Slipping down in the morning
to part around the skyrises, to marble
the rooftop shanties and gardens,
the hammocks and clotheslines.)
And graying water tanks—
(Our water lifted
into the clouds—and me, drawing it
down into my cup, my breath
pressed to the shimmering surface.)
O City—
(That breathes itself
into the glass—that pulls me to the window
I press my gaze through,
I press my face to—)
O City—
(And the makers,
who drew the City through the membranes
of paper and canvas,
giving the city to the City—)
O City—
(And our tables and demitasses,
woofers and fire escapes,
kisses in doorways, weapons
and sculptures, concerts
and fistfights, sex toys and votives,
engines and metaphors—.)
City of Joists—
(The City shot through with them.)
City of Doorways—
(The City opens us, and we step through.)
O Light-Coming-on-in-a-Window—
(Since you’ve opened the fridge,
opened your book, opened your room
to the room next door.)
O City—
(Pushing through the dark like the nose of a plane.)
O City—
(It could be a bomber, night-black, the instruments on auto, the pilot asleep in his lounger.)
O City—
(In the hull below, words are written on the bombs in Sharpie.)
(There’s also a folder of letters lying off to the side in the dark.
In one of them, the pilot’s brother describes some fingerprints he’s found pressed inside the lip of a broken jar.
He’s an archeologist. The prints are from the jar’s maker—just after the Battle of Hastings, near the end of the eleventh century.)
I
When a drop of water was found
floating on the sand, they dug a well;
and soon streets opened outward
from the core like petals, and voices
came together into houses full of air.
Houses of mudbrick and straw
clustered beneath the ridgeline
like the pieces of a dropped jar. Until
design imposed its will, and men
of power ordered the new streets
carved at right angles—across
the natural topography—and soon
building was a profession, and builders
wore the products of tailors
living in what the builders had made.
Then the City grew beautiful—
its nutlike center surrounded
by boulevards and blocks and blocks
