5
These things to describe not to describe are important.
Thats what I think I some voice not to describe
that I hear thinking I overhear. I dont mean to
be obscure. The city weighs tens of thousands of tons or more
wherever you look at it from motionless. (4th floor
of Birch Bldg., Cap College campus.) Something in your near distance
moves a leaf looking over the city then, a cloud
moves very slowly there seems to be no weather, no movement of
the clouds yet ten minutes later its all changed, invisible
winds are pulling these topographies of condensation out of, into, shapes,
though they look still. But the city is still. It has this a
not patient, not impatient a dead stillness motionless
nothing could move it except the earth to avenge itself
not on people, but on the city itself the mere fact of
it being thousands of tons of steel & concrete. Its
just an image in the eye it doesnt exist
(Ive been in offices, in other cities, working, with paper &
pencil & calculating machines, telephones, typewriters, filing cabinets
- & worn the white shirt & thus been in the city & the city
didnt exist
no, its this languour of age that makes it seem to exist
whats important? Did I start by saying something was important
that these things that go without description are important.
Description riding by
& so theres
a mind I cant say & summers over, the
whole latitude is moving. If its there as an image if its
there as inhabiting the poem thats important, because its
so for some I, almost random, but menaced by something that wont
die but that is in itself death
*
The city
a block. A little steam rising from one of the flat-topped high buildings
monolith style modern. But nothing else moving. There
across the inlet. (I looked to see if the trees on this side were moving,
to give a contrast.) I imagine winter the city in the mind
the trees, the branches, waving, blowing all around, & the rain
blowing, but the city still there, dark, in the mind. So non-existent,
that way. There when you dont see it, as you wake in it. In a
bed, in a room, in the city. In one of these blocky structures projecting
upwards rectangle & triangle shapes, in rows, among the overshadowing
trees, & in them everyone breathing separately ready
for the day as separate beings souls in this structure
structure of structures (with its specific history based
on land economy transportation sucking people in
In 1910
Vancouver then
will have 100,000
men
& do I think of them as souls? Did I say souls?
building it,
ever more motionless.
*
Eatons rescued by Sears
the elderly
ladies
with coats & artificial flowers & permanents
seated on the buses at right angles to the direction of travel
grey heads, mostly in silence, facing across the aisle
batting thoughts back
unburdening minds to high windows light of the sky
in the Marine Room at (old) Eatons
that gave on the law courts, the art gallery, the Hotel Vancouver,
(now CuiScene a bistro no windows
no crackers with the soup a 50¢ bun -
*
Young, but not fresh, as Levi-Strauss wrote of São
Paulo.
100 in concrete on the grass verge by the concrete viaduct
of the Granville Bridge monument to youth - to familiarity.
*
So a mind passes through these scenes, acknowledging them,
as also its transitory term,
& knowing
all this is
important all
to the souls
(indiscernible
to each one
they dont know theyre here
& theyre
happy not knowing
on this bus, fortunate
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