In the story, a metropolis took off like a dark-flying
machine— a ship floating on air— the bridges opened
and stretched, letting go of the river, waving
silver-dark wings. In the story, a stone
fell from the sky like an imminent
plan— leaving a hole on the path heading
towards the sea. There’s a note
I’ve been drawing and throwing away
like an unsettled sketch— in a different country
a girl is always still running, crossing
a field. The moon as a newly formed
question, the road testing out
directions— there are always new stories
to leave or begin. It’s been snowing all morning
in the city I’m missing, in the spiralling
streets of a faraway
thought. It’s been raining all night so I’m trying
to draw. There’s a train travelling backwards
in a black-and-white scene. There’s a hell of a party
on the warm-solstice shore I’m quite eager
to miss. Some dreams
are like this. On the bus I’m reading
that a field in physics is a region where each point
is affected by a force. There’s a neon-blue siren
crossing our street like a deepening
cut, there’s the blue
of a leaf in the flowering snow. In the poetry
class I ask the students to test home as the country
of memory. There’s always a street leading into
another, a train leaving a station, an unwritten
letter, a girl holding a word
like a sword. In the improvised darkness
we watch I Vitelloni and note how Fellini
reconstructed his hometown of Rimini
in Ostia— Rome. I can’t understand
why this evening keeps stretching its wings
like a mounting sub-plot— why it’s never difficult
to reimagine the sea: to add movement, a disquieting
storm, why home and imprecision
go together disproportionately well, why a poem
is a small probability that forms and
reforms. There’s a train in the story I tend
to forget but it keeps coming back— unannounced—
like a quote— we go towards the thing
we mean. In the story there are children and an airplane
racing towards the shore, a girl crossing the field
of an evening, as street after street draws away
and takes off. Dear reader, here are the gates
to the city I hold onto, hold
onto and never let go. Here is the road leading
towards the door I’m still trying
to draw. There’s a point
in the distance and I think you are there— moving
further away as I’m driving to tell you the thing
I keep whispering and saying out loud— like a code
or an unwritten note— so I won’t forget
how to say it, or whether I left it
back there— in the forest of incomplete
bridges and rivers and dark-silver
smoke, as the night— like all readers
in streetlights and snow— lifts its wings
before changing direction, soaring and leaving
the seashore, the story, the city I’m still running towards
and from.