\u0093Two Cities\u0094, by Mark Doty<\/p>\n
I had grown sick of human works,
\nwhich seemed to me a sum
\nand expression of failure: spoilers,
\nbrutalizers of animals and one another,
\nself-absorbed until we couldn’t see
\nthat we ruined, finally,
\nourselves – what could we make?
\nAn epidemic ran unhalted,
\nThe ill circumscribed as worthless and unclean;
\nthe promises of change seem hollow,
\nthe poor and marginal hopelessly marginal,
\nendlessly poor. I saw no progress,
\nand the steeping ink of this perception
\ncolored everything, until I felt surrounded
\nby weakness and limit, and my own energies
\nfailed, or were failing, though I tried
\nnot to think so. I awoke
\nin Manhattan, just after dawn,
\nin the tunnels approaching Grand Central:
\na few haunted lamps, unreadable signs.
\nAnd with a thousand others,
\nEach of us fixed on the fixed point
\nof our destination, whatever
\nconnection awaited us, I spilled
\nup the ramp and under the vault
\nand lugged my bag out onto 42nd Street,
\nlooking for the Carey Bus.
\nThe dawn was angling into the city,
\nA smoky, thumb-smudged gold. It struck
\nfirst a face, not human, terracotta,
\non an office building’s intricate portico,
\nseeming to fire the material from within,
\nso that the skin was kindled,
\nglowing. And then I looked up: the ramparts
\nof Park Avenue were radiant, barbaric;
\nthey were continuous with every city’s dream
\nof itself, the made world’s
\nangled assault on heaven.
\nThe city was one splendidly lit idea –
\nits promises intact and held
\nin a disturbed, golden suspension.
\nWeeks later, there was a second city;
\nnot really a city at all:
\nnights, in the coastal town
\nwhere I live, voices, engines
\ncough over the water
\nfrom the end of the pier
\nwhere trawlers cluster
\nand fog-rimmed lamps shimmer
\nthe undulant harbor, so that wharf\u0092s end
\nbecomes a distant city,
\nforeign, storied: extended downward
\nin the flung glitter of reflection
\n(as if it floated, on pylons of light,
\nabove a gilded, Oriental double,
\ndomes and towers blurred by rising smokes)
\nand radiating upwards, also, above itself,
\nin the mist\u0092s ethereal wash: a Venice,
\na city dreaming itself into being?
\nHad I walked out there,
\nas I have, some nights,
\nI wouldn\u0092t have reached it;
\nThat city\u0092s coherent only from this distance,
\na fable, a Venice not merely
\nbecause it is built on water,
\nbut because it is built<\/b>,
\neven though it is the capital of inwardness,
\nbuilt and erased and drawn again
\nas surely as Manhattan is:
\nliquid avenues, archives of all
\nwe\u0092ve imagined, our haunted, interior architecture
\n“Venice,” Nietzsche said,
\n“is a city of a hundred solitudes.”
\nNew York is a city of ten million,
\nAnd my American Venice
\n– phantom boulevards rippling
\nand doubled in the dark – a city
\nof two hundred and fifty million
\nsolitaires, the restless dreamers’
\ndreamed magnificence: our longing’s
\ntroubled mirror, vaporous capitol.<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n