"I saw a city"
I saw a city in a glass of wine
and raised the stem
to find its source.
The stem was fastened
by a grapevine, a twisting shoot
through sheets of rain.
It listed through an evensong
of ambulance, through shattered
afternoons of battle news.
And beneath this city,
another city,
one no one wished to visit,
a mothbox of boots
and jackets. Rain
stepped up house terraces;
rain filled a woman’s purse;
it shook her
between its silence.
And in this second city, a glass
lay drained and bled,
and here the stem became a lily,
mouth spiraling the ground,
where the stem
became a belltower
and the stem became the sound of bells
and the stem was how they trembled.
© 2007 Sarah J. Sloat
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