The Ruins

Incredible poem by Anne Winters from The Key to the City (slashes represent actual line-breaks):

The Ruins

In shorts and sneakers, torso’s weight caught/
on the bent left leg, palm flat on the granite flutings/
you crouch on a fragment of lintel. Loose masonry/
flours your hams, your calves, the right knee elbow-hooked/
against the sparrowy black ribcase. You bask economically, shoulderblades tilted/
to catch the last sun. Singularities: the eyes slightly/
protuberant, underlid reddish and wet; a slate-blue/
vein in the eyebrow. Expression: furious, inward, fixed./

Across the street, boarded tenements; on this side/
a level campus of rubble: brickmounds, a worn/
topscrim of silver and cellophane. At Eighth Avenue, one building’s/
still upright, stapled shut with a lustrous/
sheet of industrial grade aluminum. By the stoop, an afghaned/
armchair, a telephone table; here innerness and the street/
begin to converge… On the UNFIT FOR HABITATION sign/
HUMAN is spray-painted over with DOG./

The New York Times, May 6—“Some streets might have ceased to be part/
of the city. No police, fire protection; TB everywhere; heroin; in three blocks/
studied by the Times, the chance for a normal death/
for anyone is one in twenty.” A man on a step is interviewed:/
“The social workers left. The garbage trucks left. The Red Cross left.”/
Then a “lay worker” (this is poetry): “To our demented inn, the world,/
the LORD came uninvited. And only in these/
disinherited, does He hide Himself—for whom there was no room.”/

So Heaven and Earth have put their hands to the work/
that holds this boy, and holds him on this block. Not one/
light swerves of thousands outbound on the East Side Drive or reflected/
in the shady vitrines of Madison, of Park; ten minutes/
on the A Train from air-conditioning, residential/
towers still half I-beams, the endlessly pinwheeling brush-/
points of A Starry Night, and can not one of these/
banks of incandescence cast a lightline to these ruins?/

Candle saucers start yellow smears in the chickenwired/
windows of the corner tenement. It is dark now, and somewhere out in the dark/
a landlord overtightens a pressure valve. Clean rounds of brick/
where Con Ed stripped the meters; a greenish mineral/
floodstain where addicts hacksaw copper pipes/
and strip the burst boiler for salvage. Signs, straws/
in the wind, like the hairline rust circles/
next to the hydrants where women set down their pails./

The capital itself (they say) has fled the city/
that once expressed itself in rows/
of dumbbell tenements. Now insurance costs dictate/
they must seem to fall from within. One chance/
in twenty… No, no god has elected your life. Nothing’s hidden inside you/
but your dying childhood, and whatever is on its way/
from the outside to replace it. Streetlight falls/
like streaks of drypoint around the tight, huddled limbs./

Expression: obscure now, lid-glistening, as if/
you’d tried to seal yourself into something/
separate, and when this is denied a flatness/
comes into the human face. Yet it’s only the armor/
of outside, still inlaid with its useless and lovely/
uniqueness of inside. Almost you weep, taking arms, and one day/
one source of your street cool will be this tear/
spread without depth or relief over the whole eye./