Downtown

Blood, underfoot,
tingeing the cobblestones,
brimming in potholes-
the Tenderloin district, you say?
That explains the entrails
and all the opaque windows,
ideograms etched in gummy grease.

Shall we move on?
How unnerving:
these skyscrapers are just facades
and tilt-do you see?-toward a vacuity.
That's a desert where the harbor should be
and what appears to be a lighthouse
toppling into the dunes.

A veiled woman approaches.
I know her!
I remember her from the old bazaar.
I don't burn incense anymore, she says.
It is forbidden.
Then she passes into the deserted amphitheatre.
An equatorial gust
eradicates the marks we've made-
mingled footprints
in millennial dust.

"Downtown" is from Night Queue, a series of archetypal dream-poem scenarios.