Belfast

After Borges

Even here. Even now the heavy industry
of the everyday, making to be unmade,
where a word is the world between us.
Even here the casts, the brass, the rust.
Even here the birds calling in the same
music, an elegy of a half-forgotten evening
somewhere in the smolder of our history.
Even here the intangible braille of stars
spells out some meaning I cannot parse,
not even in these lines I string together
across the river, beyond the walls and down
certain passages certain persons do not pass.
Even here the longing to be elsewhere,
the anxious, precious trouble of this life.