Ex-New Yorker Remembers Her Natural Landscape
Fortress city—
houses cresting ridges
like battalions of horses
battlements of near tenements—
flaming suns leaping
from window to window
Tree-house city— how shocking my first sight
of Western towns, like knots in the ribbon
of the road, sediment in the cup
of sky,
Infinite city— shocking their visible limits
crumbling into desert,
compared to your manifold crannies,
unvisited planets,
your range after dimly inhabited
range fuzzing into blue like mountains,
and beyond those your faint white
blur, like cloudy space dense
with stars
Intimate city— greasy as dirt
under my nails, close as soot
on my eyelashes, as the secret odors
of plebeian and patrician thickening
in public washrooms, as their voices twanging
down my spine, spilling
entire histories, descents into hell,
recoveries
Vertiginous city— from your highest towers
other buildings lose
their moorings; thousands
of lanterns on swaying
ropes rock out of a fog
and far below, five o’clock tides
of dusky forests surge forward,
each tree moated by its inner
silence
and night falls fast,
so fast, piling up in steep
soft drifts, canceling
cornice, column, piling up
in streets of ash and embers
O my city of sorrows
– judy kronenfeld