MOUNTAIN

MOUNTAIN

new worlds
lost kingdoms

gold bearing rock
rich seams beneath us

and those cities
urban projects, experiments,
shanties and
great architecture

think
Moscow, Beijing, Sparta,
Delhi, Athens,
Rome, Medina,
Persepolis, Baghdad
                          New York

not forgetting
       Dublin, how could
anyone
forget Dublin

Senator William Butler
Yeats years sailing
             gong-tormented
seas all the way
to Istanbul when it
was still
named Byzantium

and mythic master and
compatriot, who else
but Joyce
    his very self

navigating the streets of the
Irish capital, dredging up the
truth of
a tragic history
    in future decades about
to explode

religion and modernity
fighting hidden
pitched
battles for his soul

somehow the conceit of
sustained Homeric
parallels
   happening to
liberate him

chatting over coffee
in Zurich, maybe Paris
with
    fascist, bolshevik and
anarchist

profound their differences but
all of it, better or
worse, still
unrealized dream

cities with ports, cities
with rivers, city
with a mountain  with
its peak sliced off
(beneath which
every idea I had
was first
   seeded and
cultivated)

cities with mountains
(to climb) I must
imagine
      few and
far between

city of flashpoint
marked
    out for

perhaps
    singularity headed, abyss
on the horizon

moment, watershed of
exquisite transcendence
wretched
     ultimate abyss