That the city, after this enormity, may be renewed

 So I saw a tweet asking...

Well...

That the city, after this enormity, may be renewed 

They told me that my sex drive would be

'ruined' - the exact word that they chose,

as if the hormones were a bomb

that would destroy the proud erections

of an engineered city.

What they didn't realise

was that my metropolis

already lay in ruins:

behind the neoclassical facades

of banks, the people gathered

'round the fires that burned in drums,

bartered shoddy goods under the tarps

slung far beneath the shattered skylights

of the covered market;

that taps gasped air and dirt

in sailors' bars beside the silted harbour:

and here, hormones came as wrecking ball

and blueprint for renewal, as mortar

in the sense of both explosive and cement,

as the new broom in City Hall,

and that, where once I had a Miesian libido,

gridded and predictable, what sprang up in its place

is more like Gehry: complicatedly

amazing; twisted and baroque,

always apparently about to

tumble in upon itself, but stronger

than the mess it seems to be.

Where once I was the New York Subway,

now I'm Harry Beck's map of the Tube

reimagined as a rollercoaster

(though I happily will go

South of the River):

complicated, multi-coloured, centripetally

alive in all directions, and I know

that cut-and-cover, and the pounding

of the tunneling machines

can look like demolition

but they aren't. I'm not in ruins:

this chaos that you hear and see

is not a war:

 it's just my future,

working.

The Burning of the Elephants

Strictly protected. She’ll tell you the story

all came to her on a train. The owner will go to the papers,

gush about saving the table, but whine his first edition

can’t be found. The cultists will claim it was arson:

they have such quaint ideas, these people, 

of causality.

The only place that got to print the legend

on its legend, since her brother-in-law’s property

became a Chinese buffet. Went on fire, they say round here,

with knowing intonation. Like the School of Art.

No word on Muriel’s location this time, but the spark,

they say, caught from the basement of the woman 

in Room Four. Why don’t you come on over,

said the paintings and statues of Indian animals,

fetishised like Joanne’s mensa, shown off like Maratha 

treasures plundered by the Royal Scots, sick of

being implicated in her veneration, sick of queues

of tourists, sick of chintzy white folks saying how exotic

it all looked, oh how Bohemian and quirky, longing

for some peace and quiet, they rejoiced to burn.

And if you’re picking through the ashes 

and the rubble in the hope of finding footsteps

or forensic spoor, a connection to the photographs

retweeted from her door,  you will not find them

where your eyes and fingers scrabble. But there is

a footprint here, which you cannot see the way fish

don’t see water. There are things

that move in ways we see

by implication only, that use people 

as their moving parts, and happen 

in a dozen or a hundred spots at once.

Take a ruler. Draw a line from here

to her Barnton house to Killiechassie.

Plot the times. Of course you can’t. 

Some days you cannot see yet since,

to you, they haven’t happened.

 

Some things are bigger than elephants