I want to forget the city that swallowed the sea,
where the churches unbreak bread and send old men
onto their hymnaled knees, where the streets sing
like handbells and the night cracks like a broken bottle
crushed under the heel of a priest taking confessions,
where the newsmen huddle on a street corner
under evening editions while the rain skins
their stubbled chins and the creeping asphalt
licks at the face of the shoreline still,
sipping at the sea, sipping at the salt
that steams up from the waves each sweaty night
and blankets the shoreline in a tight knit
of creamy silt, and I remember the prayers I said,
with my knees cupped in sand,
how I prayed to the saints for an intercession,
how it came like a punch to the blood,
wrapped its fingers around the throat of my blood,
squeezed the ribs of my blood until I could feel
the nicked edges of broken-blood ribs tickling
my blood’s tiny lungs, those neat, unfurled sails tacking up
and down my veins, and I remember the saint
of the city, our patron and the patron of bookkeepers,
the patron against lead poisoning, the patron of shims
and tambourines, the patron of hiccups and tin whistles,
patron of pandemics and against pandemics,
of ironworkers and against ironworkers, and I want to forget
when I was five, and our teacher told us to draw
a picture of ourselves, and I drew the skyline above the sea,
said I was changing my name to “The City,”
and she leaned in close and said that I would never be
the city that swallowed the sea, and my face
turned warm, and her breath was the dry hush
of the sea as it slides each day from the city,
and we rope it and haul it back like a brindle calf
with three legs tied, and we drink it a little
each day, and the censusman knocks every morning
to measure how much we drank,
and I want to forget our duty to be the city
that swallowed the sea, to be the saints of the city
that swallowed the sea, and I want to forget those streets
that ribboned and choked and split my bones,
that sea that skipped down the avenues of my nerves
and planted a kiss on the tiny bronze bell
that hangs—unpolished—from the stem of my brain.
from Litany for the CityFind it in the library
Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2012
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.