I have never lived in a tall city. I find myself forever ducking hunched street lights and squat blocks. My cities are proud of their stature. They enjoy the gaping sky hole left leaking above them. Like always, these places’ people prefer looking out to up. I prefer strength and the indifference of callousness to this warm rippling membrane covering nothing.

I have forgotten the faces of my father. I have forgotten faces. I remain hoping for something more than someone, or someone more than some thing, to flow out from around their dull eyes and leak into me. This has not happened. I have forgotten faces.

I will believe in something. I believe in words that betray me but there are no other bricks to build myself. The pain is in the lifting? No. The pain is lifting? No. You do not know. The pain lifts. I lift myself. I believe.

                I am awake because I no longer know which side of myself belongs to the bed. A side of me swims in the ice-blue light of morning; a side bends the mattress less than it is used to. The blue is Giotto’s blue. My room is clothed in the Madonna’s robes. Tiny black stars fleck my sight and pin down purity. My room is not clothed like the Madonna. That was a mistake. My room is space enrobed. Covered like prairies at night.

                I have seen plains before. I have sunk into the dead grass of Texas where immense sky shuts out earth. I have driven through Spanish fields, carelessly pouring golden sun over my arms. Plains never roll for me. How can they roll if they make you move across them? They invite you to spread yourself over them, spread your arms if you are scared or your buttocks if you have yet to decide. Plains flatten you to paper. Open spaces are not free spaces.

                That is why I stay in cities. Cities brick up the doors that open onto emptiness. Buildings provide limits. I have always wanted to live in tall buildings, where only a single naked buzzing bulb warms my hallway. Its piss-yellow glow can only go so far. Shadows are short in my desire. They tip-toe and regard televisions softly and do not remind you of real dark. There is no real dark in cities, only bright sable murmurs. A man smoking in dim alleys lights up the city with bitter flame. Lonely men are princes of the moon. Cities are never dark when these conduits remain within their iron lungs.

                I am awake in the kitchen. The bedroom drowned me in its crystal air that only moved for quick breaths. I only wear my boxers and the opacity of four in the morning. No lights are on. If I could see the wine I would be too naked to the eyes of memory. The wine remains within the silky blue blackness and does not distinguish itself. It has given me that mercy. 

…

I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy. 
But now he was looking at me.
Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes.

Everything gets crazy. When nude
I turned my back because he likes the back. 
He moved onto me.

Everything I know about love and its necessities 
I learned in that one moment 
when I found myself

thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon 
at a man who no longer cherished me. 
There was no area of my mind

not appalled by this action, no part of my body 
that could have done otherwise…

“The Glass Essay,” Anne Carson

I

The slimy tiled bathrooms where

Even the walls piss yellows:

Perfect, primal waste lands.

Graffiti falls from men’s memories,

Spilled without digestion

For surface souls sucked under.

The world turns over, heaving

And churning awake dead men.

Arise, now live, above

Trains beetling in caravan,

Breathe quickly before what

Takes us far home finds

You–

II

                – on the street,

Drunk, between lines, bars,

In New England evenings.

Stumble off the street, friend,

And find your way onward:

The river-bottom spreads for you.

Its water the color of spent film,

It laps uneasy faces on the shore.

We ride crest and trough,

We do, yes, so

Scuba dive off Storrow Drive –

Friend, see the River, don’t –

Forget –

III

                – your jacket, it’s cold –

Your hands clothe my –

                – water –

– now – down – stop –

IV

Light, find somewhere else.

We need our space as

We wind between walls

And over trash and bodies.

Flowing onward, seabound,

Jammed in waves and eddies, crowded.

Threadbared promises now

Wait in concert –

They whisper of nothing.

Leave them be.

They are far from the mouth. 

I burn myself still
On patios and front porches,
Glancing against unwrought lovers.
Between cigarettes and coffee mugs
I found a grace that sometimes lives,
A sufficient pool of quiet smiles
That only speak over grating quiet
Knowledge of the only answer.
For afternoons spent embalming
The light from your face,
Seen once in fading tinsel,
I buy a little joy that, now,
Faintly colors the evening sky
As the sun hides his unrepentance,
His smirk, his laugh, his promise to call.