“Two Cities”, by Mark Doty

I had grown sick of human works,
which seemed to me a sum
and expression of failure: spoilers,
brutalizers of animals and one another,
self-absorbed until we couldn’t see
that we ruined, finally,
ourselves – what could we make?
An epidemic ran unhalted,
The ill circumscribed as worthless and unclean;
the promises of change seem hollow,
the poor and marginal hopelessly marginal,
endlessly poor. I saw no progress,
and the steeping ink of this perception
colored everything, until I felt surrounded
by weakness and limit, and my own energies
failed, or were failing, though I tried
not to think so. I awoke
in Manhattan, just after dawn,
in the tunnels approaching Grand Central:
a few haunted lamps, unreadable signs.
And with a thousand others,
Each of us fixed on the fixed point
of our destination, whatever
connection awaited us, I spilled
up the ramp and under the vault
and lugged my bag out onto 42nd Street,
looking for the Carey Bus.
The dawn was angling into the city,
A smoky, thumb-smudged gold. It struck
first a face, not human, terracotta,
on an office building’s intricate portico,
seeming to fire the material from within,
so that the skin was kindled,
glowing. And then I looked up: the ramparts
of Park Avenue were radiant, barbaric;
they were continuous with every city’s dream
of itself, the made world’s
angled assault on heaven.
The city was one splendidly lit idea –
its promises intact and held
in a disturbed, golden suspension.
Weeks later, there was a second city;
not really a city at all:
nights, in the coastal town
where I live, voices, engines
cough over the water
from the end of the pier
where trawlers cluster
and fog-rimmed lamps shimmer
the undulant harbor, so that wharf’s end
becomes a distant city,
foreign, storied: extended downward
in the flung glitter of reflection
(as if it floated, on pylons of light,
above a gilded, Oriental double,
domes and towers blurred by rising smokes)
and radiating upwards, also, above itself,
in the mist’s ethereal wash: a Venice,
a city dreaming itself into being?
Had I walked out there,
as I have, some nights,
I wouldn’t have reached it;
That city’s coherent only from this distance,
a fable, a Venice not merely
because it is built on water,
but because it is built,
even though it is the capital of inwardness,
built and erased and drawn again
as surely as Manhattan is:
liquid avenues, archives of all
we’ve imagined, our haunted, interior architecture
“Venice,” Nietzsche said,
“is a city of a hundred solitudes.”
New York is a city of ten million,
And my American Venice
– phantom boulevards rippling
and doubled in the dark – a city
of two hundred and fifty million
solitaires, the restless dreamers’
dreamed magnificence: our longing’s
troubled mirror, vaporous capitol.

A slightly different version is in the book Atlantis: Poems.
I feel in my gut that posting this entire work is probably a violation of Doty’s property rights; I hope that some people will buy his book and get him paid a bit for it. After doing it twice tonight, I won’t do it again.
But to me, this poem perfectly symbolizes the antidote to the anomie and despair below. You don’t need brutality and death to transcend despair; the human mind and soul can find it in the brilliant smudge of sun on a building’s wall, and in the appreciation for the “banal” works of humankind, for ‘the made world’s angled assault on heaven’.