Visible Cities

Kathleen Wall

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781552389591
• eBook ISBN: 9781552389614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Visible Cities captures moments of joy and sadness that occur each day on city streets, exploring the humble triumphs and mundane tragedies of urban life. Photographs taken in locales from Regina to Venice, from Ottawa to Paris, inspire poems that reveal the unexpected beauty of the everyday experiences shaped by the cities we inhabit. Veronica Geminder's photographs peer into back lanes, admire people absorbed in public art, and consider those ruminating on their own reflections in the glass expanses of office buildings. Kathleen Wall's poems delve for the story behind the photograph, nurturing the moments that would otherwise quickly pass us by. Lose yourself in Visible Cities and uncover the vitality and complexity of urban life

Your mind under glass

Chicago

This might be your mind

with its brick facts

built up one by one,

from hunger to calculus,

from the slipperiness of sex

and the stock market

to the day you began

Act III, the day the alarm

didn’t go off

and you learned

what it means to stretch

into mortal thoughts—how

joyous and how grave!

You might want to question

the windows: do you look in

at privacy and nakedness,

at secret desires, rogue ideas;

or out toward weather, scandal,

power-plays? You keep taking

expected routes to avoid climbing

down the fire-escapes

to wrestle with wisdom.

But the black paint is thick,

scarred with use, rough

on your hands. You catch a whiff

of the alley and often decide

you don’t want to jump that far.

What you don’t see each day

is how green it is.

There’s a tower you keep

trying to climb.

But you’re out of shape.

It diffuses light everywhere

in shadows and highlights. Much

of the world comes to you here,

longing for a little face time,

confused

by the glass, drawn

by the open stairway.

Some days you baulk

at the idea that everything

your mind has turned over

has purpose. You await

some ordinary event

that will illuminate the universe

like the afternoon sun

blazoning a handful of bricks,

marking the edge

of something you’d forgotten—

exactly what will measure

or enclose your life

like a frame.

II

Questions in Our Pockets

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

—Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being

Questions in our pockets

Boston Common

I

The moment is never simple. When

you choose the flattest stones and skip them

four times into oncoming waves. When

you read, and looking up see your book

alive in the afternoon, its pages

unbound, spread in the dark

clematis purple of the world. When

you are as skillful with a shovel and a word

as with a saucepan and a song. When

you walk down an unlit hallway in the frail shadows

of November afternoons to look f...

Table of contents

• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Biographies