The Loveliest Cities

By Bill Rasmovicz

A tree hides in the shiver of its leaves
while vines take to its scaffolding to suffocate it.

The dead offer us their sympathy which is to say
their silence. The dead are a lot like the living
except they don’t say much. And what is the heart

if nothing but a telephone fluttering with a bomb threat,
love being if you carry the cross of my affection
I’ll carry yours.

I recall shouting down into the mine’s air shaft
to hear myself. What rose was exponential in size
and someone else entirely.
There were days whose sweet musk was the warm body
of a violin’s, the wind

a girl whispering through the parish yards for her cat.
Now it’s consecration by hail, the beaming effrontery
of the wrecking ball.

At the core of the mind is an obelisk dreaming you into being.
Jumping off the roof, I still think an open umbrella would
save me. And we wonder:
whose shoes were found behind

the rest stop? Murk, the barrel of a rifle—
to peer where you can’t see bottom, witness something
solid as earth liquefy. There is no discerning

a sparrow from sky really, each of which
without the other would fall. While the loveliest cities
have civilizations compounded into geologic strata

topped with screaming police lights and children
separated from their parents. Which is to say we are
phantoms of each other, that the end is always happening.