Читать книгу The City, Our City - Wayne Miller - Страница 8

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 window.

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.