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.