The City in Which I Love You

the excavated places,

I waited for you, and I did not cry out.

In the derelict rooms, my body needed you,

Make my various

names flock overhead,

I will follow you.

Hew me to your beauty.

Stack in me the unaccountable fire,

bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.

Folded one hundred times

will arise now, and go

about the city in the streets,

and in the broad ways I will seek…

whom my soul loveth.

And when, in the city in which I love you,

even my most excellent song goes unanswered,

and I mount the scabbed streets,

the long shouts of avenues,

and tunnel sunken night in search of you….

The book

on the windowsill, riffled by wind…

the even-numbered pages are

the past, the odd-

numbered pages, the future.

your cries are song, my body’s not me…

So I won’t show you letters and the shawl

I’ve so meaninglessly preserved.

Forgive me for thinking I saw

the irregular postage stamp of death;

He waited merely, as always someone

waits, far, near, here, hereafter, to find out:

is it praise or lament hidden in the next moment?

didn’t make the world I leave you with,

he said, and then, being poor, he left me

only this world, in which there is always

a family waiting in terror