you wander inside her namesake
careful hands, you
land in the corner of
my captured screen, you lean forward
i can see you smiling.
from three lenses away.
i stare at you throughout the performance
you dont look at me
once.
i thought we'd unlearned these things
i was too big to
play on swings
without hitting
my knees on the ground.
how lovely you sound
in and out of the flesh
in memory, in hindsight,
as if the rest
doesn't register.
my telescopic filter
makes you lovely,
a pattern on tiles,
repeated
Cheshire smile,
a fountain
ive never seen, in cities
i've never been to.
(9-6-9)
This one came up, quite unexpectedly, while searching cities. It's funny because I had not actually read the Namesake when this was written; what's funnier is that I spent all of last weekend reading it. More on the Namesake later. Here's more on cities:
Wikipedia encourages contributors to mimic the basic civility, trust, cultural acceptance and self-organizing qualities familiar to any city dweller. Why don’t people attack each other on the way home? Why do they stay in line at the bank? Why don’t people guffaw at the person with blue hair?
The police may be an obvious answer. But this misses the compact among city dwellers. Since their creation, cities have had to be accepting of strangers — no judgments — and residents learn to be subtly accommodating, outward looking.
Mumford elaborates: “Even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract nonresidents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its essential dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.”
The marvel of Wikipedia — and cities — is that all the intercourse and spiritual stimulus don’t make living there impossible. Rather, they are exactly what makes living there possible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29cohen.html