TWO WORKS
BY WAYNE AMTZIS
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MAP OF THE CITY
This corner or the next,
the same face
or another eyes us
Cut up and collaged by a jester's hand,
everyman bares the map of the city
There are no turnings
that do not point homeward
There are few passages
that won't shanghai one's sense of place
Here the past's to be bartered
Some hoard it
A few would be rid of it
You see in their faces
a future
that no longer fits
This mobious strip of lanes
street signs--
the Namastay! of welcoming palms
and concealing hands
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AGAINST A TURNING TIDE
Slightly out of focus, the man
climbs the splayed road from the city center
At his back, rubble of houses rises up
to swindle the sky. Where walls stand like sand-
-castles against a turning tide, baskets
nailed to the upper floors catch the light, hoops in the air
where coins are tossed. The man's burden
stoops his shoulders; his voice (could we hear through the
makeshift world that weighs on us) pulls at our own
vocal chords. It is a language we would speak,
a pitch we would hear, could we only climb free of the rubble,
could we only lift these heavy girders from our chest
Though the man is no longer in view,
his thick-soled feet plod on plod on His thick-soled feet
plod on. Barelegged, roped brow,
button-less shirt, filthy towel wrapped round his waist
Sand spills down shoulders and chest;
his basket half-full hangs back with the weight of it
Thickened soles sunk in, push out and up from the hole
he's dug. Along rock-strewn paths where the river no longer springs
through fields towards concrete frames
where cornered, bedded down
round kerosene stoves, as if camped out at the station
waiting for a train to take them away, families live
Floating against walls of sky, these raised platforms are home
In a clay pot up there midst dust rising
from piled sand and bricks, a stunted geranium blooms