Five Points, Vol. 14 No. 2

Spring 2011

From David Kirby: “Take your time. I’m afraid if I say “patience” one more time, whoever’s reading this interview will lose patience with me. But it works.”

Sample Content

Mary Jo Salter
Cities in the Sky

for James Rossant

The buildings you drew were stooped
a little like you, lanky and tall and shambling
in your cloud-colored sweater, smiling vaguely
but curiously through your chic, black-rimmed,
perfectly round glasses.

Good morning. Yes thanks, coffee.
Show me your latest cities.
Or in any case, cities I can’t keep straight.
They hunch and huddle in my head—
the toy building-block houses,
blank-faced and pink and red,
that fall willingly from some cliff you invented

but do not fall; they stall.
They stay there, falling; even you don’t know why.
We drink more coffee in Claverack,
New York, on a day of arctic cold
and I inspect another high
cloud packed like an attic

with a city, clover-leafed with ramps
of cheerful, commuting cars, wherever
cars commute up to there,
a cloud that hovers like the dream
of the cows below,
unaware they’re dreaming:
they’re realists in their watercolor,
browsing, heads down, on a meadow
of saturated green.

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