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
poems 2 die for 