Weight of Oranges & Miner's Pond

PHANTOM LIMBS "The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal heart." - Charles Baudelaire So much of the city is our bodies. Places in us old light still slants through to. Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling, like phantom limbs. Even the city carries ruins in its heart. Longs to be touched in places only it remembers. Through the yellow hooves of the ginkgo, parchment light; in that apartment where I first touched your shoulders under your sweater, that October afternoon you left keys in the fridge, milk on the table. The yard our moonlight motel where we slept summer's hottest nights, on grass so cold it felt wet. Behind us, freight trains crossed the city, a steel banner, a noisy wall. Now the hollow diad floats behind glass in office towers also haunted by our voices. Few buildings, few lives are built so well even their ruins are beautiful. But we loved the abandoned distillery: stone floors cracking under empty vats, wooden floors half rotted into dirt, stairs leading nowhere, high rooms run through with swords of dusty light. A place the rain still loved, its silver paint on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us. Closed rooms open only to weather, pungent with soot and molasses, scent-stung. A place where everything too big to take apart had been left behind.Michaels, Anne is the author of 'Weight of Oranges & Miner's Pond', published 1998 under ISBN 9780771058783 and ISBN 0771058780.