I Will Be Woven Into It

Victorian aesthetic certainties abound in this strange

city: silent tombs of eccentricity all cheek-by-jowl

like mummies in a sprawling catacomb: their legacies

are surely those of tone: their carefully bedecked

repressed proponents so determined to portray

a status quo complacency quaked – trembled –
in the fear of anarchy not one whit less – perhaps
a good bit more – than we: no strangers to that

dark catastrophe of entropy which wants to suck
the soul into its sea: but come with me and peer up
at their grand defense of cornices and doorways,
ledges and adornments, loops and stoops galooping
out of this Manhattan cornucopia’s extravagant
array of egocentric fearful hungers to, and for, display:
appreciate their mad appropriation of the whole
of European history which lards and twirls their bricks

and granite into such a spree of concrete fantasy
one wonders anyone who walks among them
doesn’t stub an awestruck toe or bump a swooning
knee – Elizabeth the First, Napoleon and Bismarck
pirouette and smash into Miss Havisham’s gray
wedding cake: unending slices of it clot the streets
in rows of arrant indigestibility: each hull and shell
and carapace of which I now enliven with my mouse-

small light: organizing their mismatched baroque
extremities and finenesses until they form a shelf
for my live self. There is a strange security to be
lapped up among these many dead appropriated
glories. I cannot tell you how in love I am with every
one of their implied forgotten misbegotten stories –
to each phrase of which I add a wanton drip of my own
blood and sperm and spit. I will be woven into it.

.