
From I Am A City Still But Soon I Shan’t Be by Roger Farr. Published by New Star Books in 2019.
A murder of crows dropping down from the sky a passage from some poem I had written years ago. We’d hooked up with that festive mob because we felt an affinity with its organs of force. The citizens lined up on the other side of the street snapped pictures and gawked as we consolidated our intimacies slipped off each other’s belts and shoes and set them In the grey plastic bins before passing through yet another full body scanner. That’s how an assemblage penetrates flesh—how Woolf’s leaden circles could have dissolved in the air —how mapping a city with paramours could be portrayed as an act of collective defence not flâneurism—how the transition from window shopping to window smashing is theorized In Constant’s “Tract on Fenestration”—the creation of new openings in the urban labyrinth to take the place of the old passages long since occluded by commerce and work requires a move from the consumption of goods and services to their immediate apprehension and redistribution—written in June 1968. By Valentine’s Day 2010 our passages Were not about space but territory not politics but police borders bodies while debates about acts were completely saturated in the icy Vancouver rain that fell for days and weeks through the aftershocks. I remember the plum trees blossomed early that year. Certain residents argued that their city was not ready for the violent aesthetic bloom of soft to dark pink Said such spontaneous eruptions were unseasonal should never have materialized before the conditions were correct: Winter then Spring he said. Red then amber. Amber then green followed by red again. These codes channel the flow of cargo traffic desire to its appropriate outlets and ports. One who enters this City from the South must travel North along Clark Past Venables to Stewart then East into the Harbour just as the streams channeling beneath the grid flow from the cemetery down Fraser and Main until they empty into False Creek. At night the water here is still and dark reflects the towers of glass with their halogen bulbs until the rain falls and the current swells to unsettle the image as though it were the city’s dream.