The Capital of Away

Disarmingly clean, this city built by Love

Where you can see a pin drop, and the Music

Of the Spheres, piped into each bedroom, costs

Nothing but never

Can be dismissed; though at will I con roof-top

Cut-outs, Brooklyn, Rome, Vienna, other

Tenacious what-have-you's in dumb-show, missing P.S. One

Hundred. love you.

I love you. That is not to be respoken.

Your place is yours, that statue in the park

Fronting our black-and-white Incurables;

You, that is, plural:

A marble cross-index now, blinding by noonlight,

Visionary, nude, featureless, dateless.

From the self-service bistro daily I can

Toast you in Ido.

Are all hues flushed away? Sun-scrubbed? Flatbush, I'd vow,

Had some, and my imperial naves. And outskirts?

Does no-one die here? Is there no underground reaching

Grand Central Station?

Orts of me, fingers, eye, ball, Wagons Lits

First Class, nightly track Europe, blinds up;

Each depot bygone blinks in rousing my far-off

"There? There!' Perhaps there

Beyond that furthest bright pane, frontier, all-night .

Drug-store, it gathers, once more cluttering some chamber,

The rainbow's promise, unbroken, hymned in the tumid

Thunder of tunnels.

It is here; it is nowhere; is itself;

And cannot in fact be sung; and builds; and remains;

And learns nothing. Homing, distance, dispersal:

This is my vintage year.