“You lived here once. City—remember?— of formerly your own, of the forever beloved, of the dead, for some part of you, this part, is dead, you have said so, and it is fitting: a city of monuments, monuments to what is gone, leaving us with our human need always to impose on memory a body language, some shape that holds. I can picture you walking this canal, this park, this predictably steep gorge through which predictably runs a river, in which river, earlier today, I saw stranded a bent hubcap, spent condoms, a cup by someone crushed, said enough to, tossed … City in which—what happened? or did not happen? what chance (of limbs, of spoils) escaped you? And yet … I have sometimes imagined you nowhere happier than here, in that time before me. I can even, from what little you have told me, imagine your first coming here, trouble ahead but still far, you innocent—of disappointment, still clean. In those historical years preceding the sufferings of Christ, there were cities whose precincts no one could enter unclean, be their stains those of murder, defilement of the wrong body, or at what was holy some outrage. There were rituals for cleaning; behind them, unshakeable laws, or— they seemed so … But this city is not ancient. And it is late inside a century in which clean and unclean, less and less, figure. At this hour of sun, in clubs of light, in broad beams failing, I do not stop it: I love you. Let us finally, undaunted, slow, with the slowness that a jaded ease engenders, together step into —this hour, this sun: city of trumpets, noteless now; of tracks whose end is here.”
