Open Cities

Open Cities

These roads are umbilical to no body, bearing

But words scattered like paper in wind, seeming

Sterile. My eyes follow your lines that run and run

The road that runs and runs – this onwards, open story

My glance is a peep of light through a pinhole, laying

No claims, a voyeur to less than suffered. There walks

New York’s Atlas with stethoscope and duffel coat, Bresson

-captive, laden with the sérieux of an elegant, cultured weighting

Story told in stasis, a wasteland of words, how should I empathise

With an Eliot-ness ages dead? With Hagar’s Mason Dead long dead?

Book bound, unbound, ornamental this for which I cannot eulogize

Meritless the nothing new of which I yet must speak.

(c) 2011 Richard Ali

Making It Again

There’s no mistake in a child’s clear paper world, all errings

Are erasable: She shreds a year and mutters; it’s just numbers

Same as I bleed the blue from yesterday’s witnessing clouds

Putting distemper in memory, leaving tryst-grounds in chaos

Empty playgrounds are lures when love is done, its

Bud of grace quarter eaten by the price we pay surely

A slammed door - another’s name – wanderlusting . . .

Absence becomes the now place where the other lives alone

I invoke my fever in the creaking of swings, thinking

Of Christ. But she’s gone to the devil and He, creation

By creation, undoes the deed of our Father’s amen

Leaving us as children, a mistaken affair erased.