Thirsty

I This city is beauty unbreakable and amorous as eyelids, in the streets, pressed with fierce departures, submerged landings, I am innocent as thresholds and smashed night birds, lovesick, as empty elevators let me declare doorways, corners, pursuit, let me say standing here in eyelashes, in invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake in the tiny shops of untrue recollections, the brittle, gnawed life we live, I am held, and held the touch of everything blushes me, pigeons and wrecked boys, half-dead hours, blind musicians, inconclusive women in bruised dresses even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible briefcases, how come, how come I anticipate nothing as intimate as history would I have had a different life failing this embrace with broken things, iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks in the brain, would I know these particular facts, how a phrase scars a cheek, how water dries love out, this, a thought as casual as any second eviscerates a breath and this, we meet in careless intervals, in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic conversations, lotteries, untranslatable mouths, in versions of what we may be, a tremor of the hand in the realization of endings, a glancing blow of tears on skin, the keen dismissal in speed A Word about the Poem by Franca Bernabei "This city is beauty." With this striking affirmation Dionne Brand opens her text to the city and immediately places the reader in the scenario of Toronto. In the long poemthirsty, Toronto will become the absolute subject and agent of her spatial critique. This critique connects the lyrical "I," the city, and the poetic text through a sapient play of prosodic rhythms and phonetic, syntactic and semantic trajectories. In its turn, the polarized but intersecting social contextualization of the multi-ethnic urban site both shapes and pulverizes the discourse of the self. A self whose inner, reflexive itinerary will crisscross the restless, tragic route of Alan, a West Indian immigrant killed by the police; those of the women making up his family; and the daily routes of the suburban dwellers and the inner-city immigrants. In the first two stanzas of this introductory poem, the self "declares" both its "innocent" condition of liminality and suspension with respect to the "fierce departures" and "submerged landings" that occur in the streets of Toronto, and its will to speak and make the city known. The shifts of grammatical subject ("this city," "I am," "let me," "we," "I"), the different speech acts and verbal modes, and two distinct but converging constellations of images one referring to the body ("eyelids," "eyelashes," "breasts," "brittle," "gnawed lives"), the other to features of the city space ("streets," "thresholds," "elevators," "doorways," "corners," "shops") mark above all the porous boundaries between the "unbreakable" and "amorous" beauty of Toronto and the surrendering "lovesickness" of the speaker's body. This porosity then invests the "I"'s relation to the other urban dwellers, with whom it shares a peculiar form of intimacy: the spatial specificity of a city as we will learn later "that never happened before." In the third stanza it becomes eveBrand, Dionne is the author of 'Thirsty', published 2002 under ISBN 9780771016448 and ISBN 0771016441.