"The City in Which I Love You" by Li-Young Lee
And when, in the city in which I love you, even my most excellent song goes unanswered, andI mount the scabbed streets, the long shouts of avenues, and tunnel sunken night in search of you...
That I negotiate fog, bituminous rain rining like teeth into the beggar's tin, or two men jackaling a third in some alley weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I drag my extinction in search of you...
Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed synagogues, defended houses of worship, past newspapered windows of tenements, along the violated, the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed city I call home, in which I am a guest...
a bruise, blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me. As bone hugs the ache home, so I'm vexed to love you, your body
the shape of returns, your hair a torso of light, your heat I must have, your opening I'd eat, each moment of that soft-finned fruit, inverted fountain in which I don't see me.
My tongue remembers your wounded flavor. The vein in my neck adores you. A sword stands up between my hips, my hidden fleece send forth its scent of human oil.
The shadows under my arms, I promise, are tender, the shadows under my face. Do not calculate, but come, smooth other, rough sister. Yet, how will you know me
among the captives, my hair grown long, my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon? In the uproar, the confusion of accents and inflections how will you hear me when I open my mouth?
Look for me, one of the drab population under fissured edifices, fractured artifices. Make my various names flock overhead, I will follow you. Hew me to your beauty.
Stack in me the unaccountable fire, bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly. Folded one hundred times and creased, I'll not crack. Threshed to excellence, I'll achieve you.
but in the city in which I love you, no one comes, no one meets me in the brick clefts; in the wedged dark,
no finger touches me secretly, no mouth tastes my flawless salt, no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses; hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated
by exhaustion and time's appetite, my sleep abandoned in bus stations and storefront stoops, my insomnia erected under a sky cross-hatched by wires, branches, and black flights of rain. Lewd body of wind
jams me in the passageways, doors slam like guns going off, a gun goes off, a pie plate spins past, whizzing its thin tremolo, a plastic bag, fat with wind, barrels by and slaps a chain-link fence, wraps it like clung skin.
In the excavated places, I waited for you, and I did not cry out. In the derelict rooms, my body needed you, and there was such flight in my breast. During the daily assaults, I called to you,
and my voice pursued you, even backward to that other city in which I saw a woman squat in the street
beside a body, and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face. That woman was not me. And the corpse
lying there, lying there so still it seemed with great effort, as though his whole being was concentrating on the hole in his forehead, so still I expected he'd sit up any minute and laugh out loud:
that man was not me; his wound was his, his death not mine. and the soldier who fired the shot, then lit a cigarette: he was not me.
And the ones I do not see in cities all over the world, the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those in prisons playing checkers with their knocked-out teeth: they are not me. Some of them are
my age, even my height and weight; none of them is me. The woman who is slapped, the man who is kicked, the ones who don't survive, whose names I do not know;
they are not me forever, the ones who no longer live in the cities in which you are not, the cities in which I looked for you.
The rain stops, the moon in her breaths appears overhead. the only sound now is a far flapping. Over the National Bank, the flag of some republic or other gallops like water on fire to tear itself away.
If I feel the night move to disclosures or crescendos, it's only because I'm famished for meaning; the night merely dissolves.
And your otherness is perfect as my death. Your otherness exhausts me, like looking suddenly up from here to impossible stars fading. Everything is punished by your absence.
Is prayer, then, the proper attitude for the mind that longs to be freely blown, but which gets snagged on the barb called world, that tooth-ache, the actual? What prayer
would I build? And to whom? Where are you in the cities in which I love you, the cities daily risen to work and to money, to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?
Morning comes to this city vacant of you. Pages and windows flare, and you are not there. Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk, wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry, and you are gone.
You are not in the wind which someone notes in the margins of a book. You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots where human figures huddle, each aspiring to its own ghost.
Between brick walls, in a space no wider than my face, a leafless sapling stands in mud. In its branches, a nest of raw mouths gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat. My hunger for you is no less than theirs.
At the gates of the city in which I love you, the sea hauls the sun on its back, strikes the land, which rebukes it. what ardor in its sliding heft, a flameless friction on the rocks.
Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning. Noisy with telegrams not received, quarrelsome with aliases, intricate with misguided journeys, by my expulsions have I come to love you.
Straight from my father's wrath, and long from my mother's womb, late in this century and on a Wednesday morning, bearing the mark of one who's experienced neither heaven nor hell,
my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned, in league with stones of the earth, I enter, without retreat or help from history, the days of no day, my earth of no earth, I re-enter
the city in which I love you. And I never believed that the multitude of dreams and many words were vain.