melancholy

For Mary Clark

 

There is an edge big cities have. I sense it

even in this airless ground floor hotel room

with its net-curtained windows that are locked

‘For your Safety and Peace of Mind’. Outside,

on the pavement below the window

is a beggar, cross-legged. He and the street

furniture are the only still things

in the broad avenue of six-lane traffic

and seemingly innumerable

and unstoppable humans of all ages,

conditions, ethnicities, and genders.

When I lie on the bed I can hear beneath me

the timetabled and metallic rhythms

of the metro; imagine the carriage lights

flickering on the tunnel walls; the strangers’

faces, alert, circumspect, preoccupied.

 

A week ago, I passed a school of dance.

Through the open skylights I could hear

the rehearsal piano, and the soft fall

of nubile ballet shoes on a sprung floor.

Returning to my hotel, I wandered

through a street market, and watched two young men,

with up-country accents, who were selling –

from the back of a horse box, unmarked

except for spatters of drying yellow mud –

a large stuffed black bear and a penny whistle.

 

Yesterday, among residential streets built

when empires were official, and the clerks

who kept their ledgers rented houses here,

I came by chance to one where an exiled

poet had lived and died. Trying to reach

the border with her small son, pursued

by armed frontier guards through a forest,

he had been shot, and bled to death in her arms.

I remembered lines from the only poem

she had published about this city:

 

…a place, for me, of possibilities

and fear. I cannot imagine its borders.

I cannot walk home. There is an absence,

a melancholy, a wistfulness,

a nostalgia: as if I had just missed

something special – a window unobtrusively

made fast, a door easing shut; someone’s

library glimpsed from a passing bus;

the surprise of a marble statue

of a child behind a neglected park’s

locked gates; above abandoned warehouses

and wharves, an unwarranted sunrise.