Atheneum Books for Young Readers

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1994 by Nicholas Christopher

Copyright acknowledgments for the poems appear on pages 223-230.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Book Design by Ellen R. Sasahara

Library of Congress-in-Publication Data is available.

0-02-042725-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-0204-2725-4

eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-4283-7

Contents

ABOUT THE EDITOR

INTRODUCTION

Ai

The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981

The Man with the Saxophone

Diane Ackerman

The Rumored Conversation with Oneself Continues in Pittsburgh

Lines Written in a Pittsburgh Skyscraper

Kathleen de Azevedo

The Suicide

Judith Baumel

Doing Time in Baltimore

Thumbs Up

Lucie Brock-Broido

The Last Passenger Pigeon in the Cincinnati Zoo

Marilyn Chin

Song of the Sad Guitar

Composed Near the Bay Bridge

Nicholas Christopher

5°

April in New York

After Hours

Amy Clampitt

Amaranth and Moly

Elizabeth Cohen

#2, Shoes

Drive-By Shooting

Thulani Davis

in the fire lane

Connie Deanovich

Connie Deanovich

Road Block: Santa Fe, New Mexico

National Assessment

Tom Disch

In Praise of New York

The Argument Resumed; or, Up through Tribeca

Mark Doty

Harbor Lights

Broadway

Rita Dove

A Hill of Beans

The Satisfaction Coal Company

Cornelius Eady

Romare Bearden Retrospective at The Brooklyn Museum

Barbara Elovic

Brooklyn Bound

Lynn Emanuel

Discovering the Photograph of Lloyd, Earl, and Priscilla

Desire

The Sleeping

Elaine Equi

Words Read by Lightning

Breakfast with Jerome

Ode to Chicago

Martín Espada

Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything

Latin Night at the Pawnshop

Alice Fulton

My Diamond Stud

Risk Management

The Wreckage Entrepreneur

Amy Gerstler

Travelogue

Debora Greger

Piranesi in L.A.

Air-Conditioned Air

Linda Gregg

The Shopping-Bag Lady

Lies and Longing  74

Jessica Hagedorn

Solea

Natural Death

Latin Music in New York

Edward Hirsch

Man on a Fire Escape

When Skyscrapers Were Invented in Chicago

For the New World

Garrett Hongo

Yellow Light

The Underworld

The Legend

Richard Howard

Among the Missing

Lynda Hull

Fiat Lux

Esther Iverem

The Time #2

Mark Jarman

Los Angeles

The Homing Instinct

Patricia Spears Jones

Christmas, Boston 1989

Day of the Dead

Prayer

Rodney Jones

Romance of the Poor

Progress Alley

Lawrence Joseph

There I Am Again

Sand Nigger

Do What You Can

Vickie Karp

A Taxi to the Flame

The Consequences of Waking

Still-Life in the Coat Factory Office

Karl Kirchwey

Natural History

Rogue Hydrant, August

Ambulance

August Kleinzahler

San Francisco/New York

East of the Library, Across from the Odd Fellows Building

Yusef Komunyakaa

The Cage Walker

Crack

Everybody’s Reading Li Po Silkscreened on a Purple T-Shirt

David Lehman

Arrival at Kennedy

The Moment of Truth

Philip Levine

An Ordinary Morning

Coming Home

Buying and Selling

Dionisio D. Martínez

Fuego

A Necessary Story

Donna Masini

Nightscape

Robert Mazzocco

Muertes

Honolulu

PBS

Susan Mitchell

A Story

Carol Moldaw

64 Panoramic Way

Carol Muske

Field Trip

Little L.A. Villanelle

Ron Padgett

Poema del City

Poema del City 2

With Lee Remick at Midnight

Molly Peacock

Buffalo

Robert Polito

Animal Mimicry

David St. John

The Avenues

Uptown Love Poem

Mary Jo Salter

The Rebirth of Venus

Grace Schulman

For That Day Only

Laurie Sheck

White Noise

The Return

Jason Shinder

Prayer

Elizabeth Spires

Good Friday. Driving Westward.

The Woman on the Dump

Cole Swensen

Line

Our Town

James Tate

What the City Was Like

Lydia Tomkiw

Last Night in Elvisville

New York Love Song (Part 1—Lower East Side)

David Trinidad

C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute

Hockney: Blue Pool

Carolyne Wright

Return to Seattle: Bastille Day

John Yau

New York Map Company (1)

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

About the Editor

Nicholas Christopher was born in 1951, and was graduated from Harvard College. He is the author of five books of poems: On Tour with Rita (Knopf, 1982), A Short History of the Island of Butterflies (Viking, 1986), Desperate Characters: A Novella in Verse & Other Poems (Viking, 1988), In the Year of the Comet (Viking, 1992), and 5° & Other Poems (Viking, 1994). He has published a novel. The Soloist (Viking, 1986), and he edited the anthology Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (Anchor, 1989). His book about film noir and the American city, Somewhere in the Night, is forthcoming from The Free Press. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Fellowship, and the Peter I. B. Lavan Award from The Academy of American Poets. Most recently, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry for 1993-94. He has published his work widely in leading magazines and literary journals and in various anthologies in the United States and abroad, and has taught at several universities, including Yale, Barnard College, Columbia, and New York University. He lives in New York City.

Introduction

Unlike the countries of Europe, not to mention Japan and China, the United States boasts enormous cities today, at the end of the so-called American Century, that barely existed one hundred fifty years ago. Los Angeles is a good example: a mission settlement belonging to Spain in 1830, by 1945 it had become a five-thousand-square-mile sprawl. In 1830, Detroit was a trading post on a dirt crossroads. Houston a muddy frontier town called Harrisburg. San Francisco a small hilltop settlement that went by the name Yerba Buena. Chicago had yet to be incorporated as a village. Denver and Seattle, of course, didn’t even exist. In historical terms, our urban culture has developed at hothouse speed, with all attendant hothouse permutations and outgrowths—spectacular, freakish, stunted, and delirious. Gilded ages worthy of Imperial Rome and slums to rival Calcutta’s. Quicksilver migrations, immigrations, and displacements. Boom times and fierce depressions, in which whole industries, ethnic groups, and cultural phenomena have thrived and vanished in the wink of an eye.

All this in one hundred fifty years—hardly a blip on the screen of world history. With the Industrial Revolution, most of our big cities expanded exponentially after the Civil War. And from Whitman and Poe, our first truly urban poets (who took different forks off the same road), and then Stephen Crane to Hart Crane, there is a long and important line of poets that first becomes apparent with the consolidation of these cities as mass centers and continues to thrive in the present day megalopolis. If American rural poetry reflects the flux of nature, and of man-in-nature as both observer and participant, American urban poetry must mirror a far more complex sort of flux: not just of populations in a man-made environment, but of the myriad human activities and crosscurrents—economic, political, religious, sexual, intellectual, artistic—that define that environment. The tableau of urban poetry is, quite simply, all of human society and every occurrence therein—from the erection of skyscrapers and suspension bridges, to the game a child might invent on a sidewalk, to the words murmured between two mourners at a funeral. A literally infinite range of subject matter.

American cities are physical labyrinths, and also spiritual and metaphysical ones. The business of the city poet is to chronicle, explore, excavate, and reflect the byways, recesses, and inner chambers of that labyrinth. Sometimes the reflections he or she comes upon in the depths of the maze will be from a dark mirror, or a mirror of dizzying clarity, or even a funhouse mirror of strange distortions, but I would argue that the resultant poems represent the most vivid and significant strain in modern American poetry.

I should make clear that by urban poetry in this book’s subtitle I do not only mean poems about cities, or poems with the city (generically or metaphysically) as a subject. Of course there are such poems in this book, but in choosing them, and the many other various poems I settled upon, I did not want to be restricted by such a narrow (and arbitrary) overall definition. As a starting point, I tried always to keep in mind the innumerable themes that the city (whatever American city it might be) would filter and radiate through its poets, and their poems, to their audience. How the basic themes of love, sex, renewal, memory, and death are dealt with from an urban perspective, in urban settings. A riveting city poem can be about a love affair, a dream, a meal, a midnight walk, a snowstorm, a crime; its perspective will be dictated by the imagination of the poet. In this book, the very particular lens for that perspective is the American city of our own time. The sort of city that contains, and is defined by, so many extremes: opulence and poverty, exhilarating beauty and harsh ugliness, private anonymity and public nakedness, salvation and corruption, mundane drugdery and spiritual transcendence, and so on. In short, I would hope that the poems in this anthology provide not just a unique overview of the astonishing and tumultuous events that have unfolded (or exploded) in American cities in recent years, but also a fresh and vibrant glimpse into the more private dramas and comedies of individual lives in metropolitan settings. For what is the poet in essence—however broad his cultural canvas—if not a spokesman for the individual (with all the weight that word carries, and should carry, for an American).

Emerson put it simply: The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. In other words, in poetic terms, we might turn around the national motto, E pluribus unum, and proclaim instead, From the one, many. Worlds unto themselves, our cities were fed during and after Reconstruction with crucially important migrants from the rural South—African-Americans, former slaves and the offspring of slaves—who, despite disenfranchisement on a grand scale, persecution legal and otherwise, and an obscene denial of basic human rights, intensified, enriched, and transformed our urban culture inestimably. At the same time in our history, there was a vast influx of immigrants, coming from every other country on the planet and flooding our cities. People with different languages, customs, beliefs—and prejudices. How much more complex, fertile, and volatile this has made our cities—in comparison to foreign cities like Tokyo whose national governments practically prohibit immigration of any kind, much less racial variety—cannot really be calculated. (Census takers in 1990 reported that a single four-square-block area in Queens, New York, boasted no less than one hundred eighteen different nationalities of registered aliens and foreign-born citizens!)

The German historian Oswald Spengler, writing on the eve of the First World War (when legal immigration to the United States was at its peak), stated that the emergence of New York as a world-city was the single most important development in the nineteenth century. It marked not only the ascendancy of the United States as the preeminent international power, but was also the historical moment in which American cities became the magnet for mass immigration. These immigrants and their successors, from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, literally