Cities

 

City Lives.

  

They shout into space,

answer each other like whales

across great haunted distances;

they never meet,

only sound waves ever meet.

 

 

Alone in their canyons,

hives,

shoals

they roar.

Rooms upon rooms

upon houses upon houses

upon streets upon streets:

roars spilling out,

spilling over,

spilling down.

 

A million sound waves,

a million discordancies

tumbling, surging, 

pouring out

onto the streets,

into the traffic,

wheels, cogs, pistons:

 

the cannibal jazz

of cities.

 

Where Are You

         Where Are You.

 

Where are you.

Where are you child.

Among the spring green leaves

Naked as a lizard;

I hear your airy lilt,

Why are you humming.

 

From what remote well

Do these grotesque sounds come;

Dispatched, bleak cirrus

In the high skies of a child's voice,

Freezing all the forest

Into fairy-tale stillness.

 

Where are you,

Where are you child.

In what empty paradise;

Where's the tower that emits your eccentric song;

Against the frozen wings of which birds of paradise

Do you rub.