The City, Our City. Wayne Miller

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

      of 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