rooms, and the top-floor windows were beacons to distant travelers—
Take me to the bricks of light, they cried, those walls of backlit crosses.
DEAR AUDEN,
The City in its ball rolled forward—
(the same City that, in its jar,
had engulfed the hill).
The City was the wall I lay on,
then the City
was the voice I spoke into.
When gunmen exchanged fire
across my yard, the City
filled the bullets, which so briefly
breathed in their motion.
Later, the City was silence
threading through birdsongs.
I listened from the sun porch,
which seemed to hang
above the rotting picnic table.
The City was looped in the ring
I gave my lover to say: we would
live together inside the City.
Each July, the City hissed with light
at the sparklers’ blinding cores.
When the City spread its darkness
over me, I loved the warmth
of the susurrations, and when the City
lifted me above the City
I leaned my head
against the egg-shaped window.
O Auden—O City—
what abstractions I had:
the illusions I swung from
along your neoned, crisscrossing,
paperflecked streets
I once believed
formed a bower of iron.
THE FEAST
1.
The table at which we sat had been destroyed in the war, then rebuilt from its pieces recovered behind the glassworks.
The food was sumptuous. Beyond the leaded windows there were hedgerows budding in lilac and white. When a streetcar passed clanging, I suppressed a sudden urge to ting my glass with my spoon.
Being strangers, we had little to talk about. So when at last Adam stood, we tipped forward into the words of his toast with the zeal that only strong liquor imparts.
From then on, things were better. We began to laugh. By eleven, I thought the night was a real success.
2.
I was lying just then—in truth we were terrified. We watched ourselves twist in the bells of our water glasses. How could we know who might stand to speak next, or what things he might say?
None of the servers could talk in our language. When an airplane buzzed the street, we all flinched in unison.
In the hills, there were distant bursts of artillery—then vast swatches of silence.
II
In the churches, stained glass
pressed blue upon the altars, priests
possessed the power of the bread
they held aloft. Nobles’ weapons
were blessed, and the dark wine
the people drank filled them of course
with God. In a back-room ossuary
of monk-skull bricks, pilgrims
kissed a stranger’s femur. What
can one say of such rooms?—bodies
turned inside out, flesh reduced
to stale pink wafers? Yet, the spire
of the Royal Cathedral kept
growing in its primitive scaffold,
workers all day mortaring
buttresses, carving eyes right into
the heads of statues—. And when
the scaffold was pulled away
the intricate tower hatched
into a world it already inhabited.
FLOODING THE VALLEY
Then the City rose in the valley,
filling first the long furrows
in thin glassy lines, then
the roads, the pastures, rising
up
