Letter to New York City after Madrid

This city, citizens, doesn't build monuments. Instead she gives them daily to the light on the dog-eared corners of avenues named, for example, after Euclid in neighborhoods from which geometry shies. They are born orphans. They roam the streets uncast into bronze. Ashes of newsprint blacken their skin like settled battle-dust and the coins in their closed fists tinker and toll for the unsung widows who out their windows lean, whose elbows nudge potted flowers off the sills. These flowers fall to the feet of the city’s buildings, some of whom have knelt, and lie in unwitting tribute to those buildings, whose long shadows are echoes of the black-clad widows who lean over the lists of the missing which constitute the newspapers daily.

Sometimes by way of well-meant reprieve, the editors interrupt the shuffling of names with an aside. For example, citizens, today in three hundred words, the story of a man who would not put his foot to his Volkswagen's pedal after he screech-halted on Broadway in front of a pair of shoes which lay in the road, their toes pointing towards him. He swore he saw a woman rising out of those shoes. For this he was taken by the armpits to the Hudson and left to rot on the carcass of a pier from which he could see civilization's horizon just enough for it to clutter the chambers of his heart but not enough for it to cast him into the final round of dreams.

Within hours however a hunt reminiscent of Cinderella will prove that his wedded wife used to wear those arresting shoes in the days before her man and her kin clad themselves in black in her name, I swear it, citizens. Believe me though I am not here to take the water-towers off the roofs by the scruffs of their collars in order to show you the ribbons of satin that shimmer and gleam on their slatted skin. I know, citizens, that their weeping will urge you to insist on the existence of cities uncluttered by bronze, cities unshrouded by newsprint, cities and windows brimming with women instead of widows.