I

At the New Directions offices, on Eighth Ave., on the nineteenth floor,
Barbara Epler takes me out on the balcony, into the biting cold,
smiling as if her life were too rich for a single ungenerous moment,
and does not even think of saying, "Look—none of this will be yours."

A city of water without the placable satisfactions of water.
A city of Gallic liberty without the sanity to be free.
A city of mock-European quirks on a dull Adelaidean grid.
A city of two great absences, and an overtowering presence.

The bony old hands of Ezra Pound in a photograph on the wall:
with these American hands were writ poetic greatness, and barbarism.
In a drawing on Barbara's business card,
a bear is giving Doc Williams a blow job. I may be wrong about this.

—Kathrin, the city seems to know us better than we know ourselves:
the Hudson River, the street ravines, the subway, and the very light,
even the mounds of dirty snow and the uncollected garbage bags,
they all agree that three thousand miles apart is no place to be.


II

The Caffe Reggio, where Brodsky used to write,
likes to tell its Soho clientele
that items of the furniture were owned by the Medici.
These heavy pews and busts and mirrors would have sunk another Titanic.

Stephanos jobs as a porter at Sotheby's,
rises at six to write his poetry,
glows with devotion, and with the first soft corruption of disillusion.
He's wonderful. A republic unto himself, of a kind unfamiliar here.

His woman in North Carolina's in for the usual Sex and the City ride
with yet another man who can't commit.
A garret in Paris is what he wants. Poverty and time to write.
A life that self-destructs with dedication, words and art.

—Kathrin, these lines in a notebook
are taking me far away from this darksome gloom on MacDougal,
taking me even away from a friend who loves the things that I love,
taking me anywhere I can see your eyes.


III

WALK. I walk. DON'T WALK. I walk. The empire, still at peace,
goes about its business, undistinguished, savvy, occupied,
witless in its ironies: Osama bin Laden, in battledress,
on the New Yorker cover, studies the map of the subway.

In a Madison Avenue bistro I sit reading Aharon Shabtai.
"They've taken the word peace by the hair," he writes of his country's leaders,
"dragged it out of its humble bed, and turned it into their whore."
The empire, still at a peace of sorts, goes about business it understands.

Eliot, spirited, greyer now, of good cheer and resource,
walks me around his Village patch. His whole life is an essay.
He is a man who would notice the fall of a sparrow.
The empire, still at the kind of peace it understands, does business.

—That morning you were woken, Kathrin,
by hundreds of migrant geese in the neighbouring field,
did you not hear them repeating, as they rested on the flight,
that words of yours I've come to love, "somewhen"?


IV

Busy-bodied, querulous, unremitting,
Becky, the elder, bickers her sister to itsy-bitsy pieces,
a pitiless bird obsessively pecking away,
stabbing its dinning beak over and over into an empty tin.

"Fuck you." And then "I love you, sis." And then "Fuck you" again.
It's like a souvenir ashtray falling and shattering into shards.
Who'll fit the pieces together again? And when? This is archaeology:
even from these remains I could write the eighteen-volume history.

Here on the Upper West Side, the city's a buried half-hearted effort.
The father, a mild-mannered spectacled shrike, picks off the shelf
another book of third-rate verse, pleasantly proselytising.
Who are these people? What is this city? Whose words are these on the page?

—Kathrin, my kisses return to your sex.
Across the wastes I have come, an animal to a salt-lick,
the past a privation, a purposelessness,
before me a freshness, a wetness, a tang.


February 2003