Читать книгу The City, Our City - Wayne Miller - Страница 7

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.)