Читать книгу The City, Our City - Wayne Miller - Страница 9

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 her face with his brush has a certain erotic appeal—

though soon he decides such love is merely a love for the work itself.

Sometimes they break for fruit and beer,

then almost too soon it’s back to the work at hand.

So when a gunshot taps at the room’s thin window,

they hardly notice, and when the war slides in like a storm cloud—

swallowing her up in its passing—he feels as if the damage done

is not to the City or to them, finally, but to the painting.

Then reconstruction is finished; a friend gives him a camera—

and how he loves the idea of light striking the pictures into being.

He begins to photograph the façades and alleys,

the kiosks and cafés. Now the unfinished portrait haunts him;

he brings it up from the cellar. And the photograph he takes of it

at first is more to preserve his thoughts of those afternoons with her.

But then the portrait floating in the fixer’s orange glow

emerges into a sealed and beautiful distance.

He blows it up and mounts it on fiberboard—and now

in that enlargement, more clearly than ever,

the image remains unfinished. He sets up the print on an easel,

takes out his oils and brushes, and begins to paint—