Visible City

Washed in a green, webby light, festival, playing

A chord, playing the near-most exotique

For a sterner nation, a brass mirror, a song where the word

Sin stands out, is thought to, anti-puritan but not

Anti-god, playing a flirt, saying you could land a landed kiss

Here, quick, lick; and,

Later, this city washed more literally and more blue

With waters as close as cousin Cuba, as far as the far-walked shores

Of my playful Brazil,

So that it was its image, not just its people, not just our bodies puffy

As a hemorrhoid against the water’s

Advancing image, that was flooded; and

If sense is true, sight like a deeper speech,

An art, if that is true, then it is between these many poles

The city is seen:

The city, not just the given

Notion of the city, that screen we call myth, call the dark,

But the brick and spit of it, iron, horseshit, the river,

A mosquito vetting it for blood, mud, August,

The cathedral in August—it is in these, first, the eyes build their purpose,

Build a line: New Orleans

As that modern text, witnessed and revised by the light as radically

As by the water, which is history, which

Slips through your hands. This city is a ghost I wear.

—Rickey Laurentiis