The City, Our City. Wayne Miller
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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