The City, Our City. Wayne Miller

      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 through the porch boards,

      the floorboards, lifting bales

      of hay from the fields, climbing

      the fence posts, the woodpile,

      rising in the sooted chimney

      stone by stone, up the staircase

      to slide across the wood floor,

      soaking the featherbed,

      past the top of the banister,

      the grayed vanity mirror,

      climbing the trunks of trees

      until the leaves were swallowed,

      the City then scaling the long

      sides of the valley, dilating

      as it rose toward the sky,

      up its own great wall, where

      cars lined the roadway,

      where hands lined the railing—

      then down the long chutes

      in white braids of froth,

      the City spilled out.

STREET FIGHT

      What it was that filled me,

      filled me entirely.

      The only space left

      was inside my fists.

      They came alive with me, as a window

      comes alive with a sudden,

      human shape.

      And I hurled myself against that fucker

      who before

      was my friend, who again

      is my friend. Above us

      the overpass

      seethed with the arriving breakers

      of tires, and when a car

      rolled past

      it honked and cheered us on. And when

      I fell, the pavement confettied

      my palms,

      and I slipped from my hands

      so they became useless. Our shouting

      shuttled between us

      like a piston. And then

      we were parched;

      I found our bottle where I’d left it

      by the mailbox,

      and that was the end of it.

      Except this lip, this knuckle.

      —And you,

      who watched from the windowdark,

      dialtone

      pressed to your ear. Which

      of our words spilled into the pillow

      beside you? What

      crisscross of circles

      lapped at your sleep?

A HISTORY OF ART

      First: a face—and the light that hits it from the inside.

      And someone notices that light and wants to keep it.

      Soon: a color-slicked finger, then a brush,

      then the void of a canvas—on which a room begins to appear.

      And it goes without saying: there’s all this time while the painter works—the fan’s blur in the window, the plastic rustling of ferns.

      This goes on for days. Only once does he admit

      a vague love for his subject sitting there—

      shaping