Cities were moving slowly over the land.
Stationary cities glittered in the sun.
What do you think of rooms with millions
of people in them, people you don?t know?
Their lives are clandestine, at least compared
to yours, some preening the coal-black wings
of paper planes to flick from windows, others
resting under soft globes of light, having
sworn allegiance to the care-worn ash-plant
giant against the gnarled wall. Some
can see the park from their windows,
the needle-like towers behind the park, and over
the towers the sea and its towers, the cities
moving over the sea, the roaming cities.
In a Chinese room they are painting red leaves
on calico fustian with bamboo pens.
Sea widows walk the terraces along the gables,
patient and watchful. Meteors flare
against the sky, and over mahogany stairways
the portraits of ancestors in dark and angular
frocks are darkening the walls, one named
Ogalalla Violet Louise. You’ve invented
the name for someone you will never know.
This is the orchestration you have trained for,
and then re-imagined, outside Etruscan theaters
where still other strangers undergo their metamorphosis
into flames and yellow branches, their
transformation into friends, and friends still stranger
then the winged men drifting down from the sky
in wide, slow circles.