SOFIJA KALJEVIC

THE CITY

You said, “I will go to another place, to another shore.
Another city can be found that’s better than this.
All that I struggle for is doomed, condemned to failure;
and my heart is like a corpse interred.
How long will my mind stagger under this misery?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look
I see the blackened ruins of my life,
which for years on end I squandered and wrecked and ravaged”.
 
You will find no other place, no other shores.
This city will possess you, and you’ll wander the same
streets. In these same neighborhoods you’ll grow old;
in these same houses you’ll turn gray.
Always you’ll return to this city. Don’t even hope for another.
There’s no boat for you, there’s no other way out.
In the way you’ve destroyed your life here,
in this little corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else. 

C.P. Cavafy, The Canon. Translated from the Greek
by Stratis Haviaras, Hermes Publishing, 2004

THE STRANGER’S PATH (excerpt)

There are few greater delights than to walk up and down them in the evening alone with thousands other people, up and down, relishing the lights coming through the trees or shining from the facades, listening to the sounds of music and foreign voices and traffic, enjoying the smell of flowers and good food and the air from the nearby sea. The sidewalks are lined with small shops, bars, stalls, dance balls, movies, booths lighted by acetylene lamps, and everywhere are strange faces, strange costumes, strange and delightful impressions. To walk up such a street into the quieter, more formal part of town, is to be part of a procession, part of a ceaseless ceremony of being initiated into the city and rededicating the city itself.

J. B. Jackson

FIFTH AVENUE, UPTOWN (excerpt)

There is a housing project standing now where the house in which we grew up once stood, and one of those stunted city trees is snarling where our doorway used to be. This is on the rehabilitated side of the avenue. The other side of the avenue — for progress takes time — has not been rehabilitated yet and it looks exactly as it looked in the days when we sat with our noses pressed against the windowpane, longing to be allowed to go "across the street." The grocery store which gave us credit is still there, and there can be no doubt that it is still giving credit. The people in the project certainly need it — far more, indeed, than they ever needed the project. The last time I passed by, the Jewish proprietor was still standing among his shelves, looking sadder and heavier but scarcely any older. Further down the block stands the shoe-repair store in which our shoes were repaired until reparation became impossible and in which, then, we bought all our "new" ones. The Negro proprietor is still in the window, head down, working at the leather.

James Baldwin, Esquire, 1960

INTERIORS

You must have seen them: these small towns and tiny villages of my homeland. They have learned one day by heart and they scream it out into the sunlight over and over again like great gray parrots. Near night though they grow preternaturally pensive. You can see it in the town squares, where they struggle to solve the dark question that hangs in the air. It is touching, and a little ludicrous, to the foreigner, because he knows without a second thought that if there is an answer—any answer at all—it certainly won’t come from the small towns and tiny villages of my homeland, try as sincerely as they might, poor things. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, The PARIS REVIEW, issue 190, fall 2009

CITY

Sullen city of motile skies
Impinged upon sad stone piles,
I have traversed your hard-crusted streets
And seen the severe swollen crowd-stream.
I mock your law that says I should be as other men,
Living in boxes,
Working in the centre of a confusion of iron.

Your weakness, city,
Is that you have a soul.
A rhythm of men living together is in you,
Although their laughter is brutal and seldom.
In the long sunlessness of your streets there is a soul.
In the screaming of your traffic
That has eluded the futile weeping of gulls,
In the sagged bodies of your street women and their copper
laughter,
There is a song with words that do not matter.
Whether you will or no,
And though each of you folk
Should suddenly bury his teeth in his neighbor’s throat,
There is a soul, and that is your weakness, city.

The sky, and the sea that carelessly takes your ships –
These see your soul, city,
The soul you would destroy with your hands.
That is why you are given sunlight,
And why you are allowed to see
The calm marriage of these two old gods,
Mocking your hands, city.

I have seen your soul,
I have taken knowledge of it from the sky and the sea.
This is why I mock your law that says I should be as other
men.

Laurence Hartmus, POETRY: A Magazine of Verse, April 1926

IDEAL CITY

Oil on panel, central Italy, c. 1500

Set in the silence of pure perspective,
the ideal city has no people in it,
only buildings. On these streets Order rules
with a golden stylus, and in the balance
of dome and arch and door frame, we find
serenity, child of proportion.
Maybe this place is an alternate Eden
created by an urban God who hated gardens.
Or maybe this is Heaven just before Judgement Day,
and the buildings are simply waiting for the Chosen
who will rise from their graves to come and inhabit them.
At night when the clarity of light must finally fade
I hope that the Virtues step down from their columns to dance
a little or, better still, cook pasta in the invisible kitchens.

But the Italian clouds with their casual cumulus shapes
don’t really belong in this sky, and though the doorways
are partly ajar, they seem to open on nothing but blankness.
In such a city, I wonder where lovers can embrace
or where the dog can lift his shaggy leg.
Then I want to break all the laws of Geometry,
to litter these spotless streets with the pungency
of orange peels and the glaze of cigarette wrappers,
to put my arms around the bronzed columns, then shinny
up them, pretending to be one of the Virtues myself.
I want to run through the streets playing the radio
with its volume turned all the way up.
I want to sign my name, and yours too,
with the scarlet graffiti of laughter.

Linda Pastan, The PARIS REVIEW, issue 123, fall 1992

KICK ME (excerpt)

My cottage was tucked behind a stretch of all-night falafel joints,
and drive-thru espresso huts. The butchers as Esperanza Market
grilled skewered chickens on poles in metal half-barrels
stationed on the sidewalk like mini-tanks, smoke drifting
in my window Saturdays, making me so hungry I’d walk right past
the health food store, its sign engineered by anarchist employees
as a weekly font of motivation: “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm”
above “VitaPro Sale - Entire Line $6.99!” I didn’t know anyone
in town then, and on days when I wasn’t teaching, cashiers
at the Food & Herb Bin were my only social interaction.

Erika Meitner, Ideal Cities: Poems, 2010

CITY OF HUGE BUILDINGS

City of huge buildings into which men have poured their souls,
City of innumerable schools where little children are thought and cared for,
City of the great University, discussing solemn and learned questions,
City of well-dressed, beautiful women, sleek, satisfied, sure of their clothes and of themselves,
And their husband sleek and satisfied also:
I, a common prostitute, in the wan morning buying cocaine,
Ask you the meaning of it all.

Florence Kiper Frank, POETRY: A Magazine of Verse, October 1914

CITY DOG (excerpt)

…Disco Rollerblades in the park
(line-dancing Frankenstein Rockets),
wheelbarrow strollers,
weepy eucalyptus shedding medicinals,
the fuschia and the foxglove
and ragtag lovers on the grass,
in a city only, if you please,
for the country will give us no peace,
nor save or heal us.

W. S. Di Piero, City Dog: Essays,2009

CITY

It’s noises the triphammered drill the
Incessant riveting the bang and roll of
Trash-cans the clash gears by El wheels
The pneumatic tumult of subways
The booming headlines the never-stillness of
Always some voice some footstep
It’s the truck-rumbled dawns the taxied dusks
The chug and thud of busses the
Sticky whine of tires the angry horns the clang of
Fire-trucks the cataclysmic sirens the cop-whistles
It’s noise that mean city

James Daly, POETRY: A Magazine of Verse, July 1938

ZIMSKI DNEVNIK
19. januar – sreda

... i u 15.10h dosetam do jednog coska, i iz jedne ulice skrenem u drugu, i tu se setim da je tu stanovala, a mozda jos uvek i stanuje, jedna devojka, covece al’ sam je voleo, bas tako, ili bio zaljubljen, nemam pojma, i covece, al’ sam je zaboravio, i to skroz, i da nisam sad slucajno usao u ovu njenu ulicu, ko zna kad bih se nje setio. Eto, vidis kako to ide, kad ides. Imala je predivne grudi i usta.

Srdjan Valjarevic, Zimski Dnevnik, Sarajevske Sveske

FOG

The fog comes
on little cat feet. 

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

 Carl Sandburg

CITY OF SHIPS

City of ships!
(O the black ships! O the fierce ships!
O the beautiful, sharp bow’d steam-ships and sail-ships!)
City of the world! (for all races are here;
All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!
City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and out, with eddies and foam!
City of wharves and stores! city of tall facades of marble and iron!
Proud and passionate city! mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
Spring up, O city! not for pease alone, but be indeed yourself, warlike!
Fear not! submit to no models but your own, O city!
Behold me! incarnate me, as I have incarnated you!
I have rejected nothing you offer’d me - whom you adopted, I have adopted;
Good or bad, I never question you - I love all - I do not condemned anything;
I chant and celebrate all that is yours - yet peace no more;
In peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is mine;
War, red war, is my song through your streets, O city!

Walt Whitman

THE WASTE LAND (excerpt)

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

T. S. Eliot

ULICA
 
ulica
je nagrada
ulica
je kazna
kako kome dopadne
iskustva su razna
ulica
je vesela
ulica
je tuzna
sta daje to uzima
nikom nije duzna
ulica
je naivna
ulica je stroga
od nje sam naucio
malo mnogo toga
ulica
je nicija
ulica
je nasa
ponavljace ponavlja
uci odlikasa

Skart (Ne ja: pesme za vikanje i skakanje, 2015, Dam-das, Beograd)

STORIES OF THE STREET

The stories of the street are mine, the Spanish voices laugh. 
The Cadillacs go creeping now through the night and the poison gas, 
and I lean from my window sill in this old hotel I chose, 
yes one hand on my suicide, one hand on the rose. 
I know you've heard it's over now and war must surely come, 
the cities they are broke in half and the middle men are gone. 
But let me ask you one more time, O children of the dusk, 
All these hunters who are shrieking now oh do they speak for us? 

And where do all these highways go, now that we are free? 
Why are the armies marching still that were coming home to me? 
O lady with your legs so fine O stranger at your wheel, 
You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal. 
The age of lust is giving birth, and both the parents ask 
the nurse to tell them fairy tales on both sides of the glass. 
And now the infant with his cord is hauled in like a kite, 
and one eye filled with blueprints, one eye filled with night. 

O come with me my little one, we will find that farm 
and grow us grass and apples there and keep all the animals warm. 
And if by chance I wake at night and I ask you who I am, 
O take me to the slaughterhouse, I will wait there with the lamb. 
With one hand on the hexagram and one hand on the girl 
I balance on a wishing well that all men call the world. 
We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky, 
and lost among the subway crowds I try to catch your eye.

Leonard Cohen, album Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1967

14
 
I mnogo takvih ljudi
Setaju gradom
Sami
Kupili keks
I jedu ga

Milan Miladinovic (Moj doprinos sveopstem haosu, 2011, Pesnicenje, knjiga br. 32)

MISTIFIKACIJA

Ti prodjes ulicom
I ulica postane prica.

Milan Vukelic (U hodu, 2010, Pesnicenje, knjiga br. 11)

NORTH SLOPE BOROUGH (excerpt)

I see the F train’s twin headlights blooming into the station.
When I close my eyes, its warm wind sweeps hair from my face,
the way my grandmother did with her hands, to see my eyes.

Erika Meitner, Ideal Cities: Poems, 2010

CITY TREES

The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.

And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.

Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come,—
I know what sound is there.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Poem Hunter

THE CITY IS PEOPLED

The city is peopled,
with spirits, not ghosts, O my love:

Thought they crowded between
and usurped the kiss of my mouth
their breath was your gift,
their beauty, your life

Hilda Doolittle, poets.org

IN THE CITY OF NIGHT (excerpt)

(To the Memory of Edgar Allan Poe)

City of night,
Wrap me in your folds of shadow.

…

City of rain,
city where the bleak wind batters the hard drops once and again, sousing a shivering, cursing beggar who clings amid the stiff Apostles on the cathedral portico;
City where the glare is dull and lowering, city where the clouds flare and flicker as they pass upwards, where sputtering lamps stare into the muddy pools beneath them;
City where the winds shriek up the streets and tear into the squares, city whose cobbles quiver and whose pinnacles waver before the buzzing chatter of raindrops in their flight;
City of midnight,
Drench me with your rain of sorrow.

…

John Gould Fletcher, poets.org

A VIEW OF DELFT

In that town,
across the water
where all has been seen
and the bricks are cherished like sparrows,
in that town like a letter from home
read again and again in a port,
in that town with its library of tiles
and its addresses recalled by Johannes Vermeer
who died in debt,
in that town across the water
where the dead take the census
and there are no vacant rooms
for his gaze occupies them all,
where the sky is waiting
to have news of a birth,
in that town which pours from the eyes
of those who left it,
there
between two chimes of the morning,
when fish are sold in the square
and the maps on the walls
show the depth of the sea,
in that town
I am preparing for your arrival.

John Berger, Landcapes: John Berger on Art, page 105

THE JUDGEMENT OF RICHARD RICHTER (excerpt about Sarajevo)

“I’ll start with the history of our day, which has been erasing slowly but surely the city-worlds, our latter-day Babylons, the sanctuaries in which even the simplest were born speaking several languages, but the soul - my apologies for that tired word, but I have no substitute - is gone, carried off with people to graves, to exile. Let us start with Alexandria with no Greeks, Jews, or Europeans, to a divided, troubled Jerusalem, to a Nicosia, sliced in two, to Damascus and Aleppo, to Beirut, warring within, to an Istanbul with no Greeks and Armenians, to a Salonika without its Turks and Sephardim, to give only the examples we know best… But the disease didn’t limit itself to the Ottoman Empire. Tell me what is left today of cities such Trieste, Vilnius, Koenigsberg, Warsaw, Lviv, Odessa, and Chernivitsi…? Sarajevo, I fear, stands at the end of this list. Cities disappear; what remains are memories, empty houses, and the occasional witness like me.”

Igor Stiks, page 121

REDRAWING THE MAPS: KRAKOW

In the centre of the square stands a low building, subdivided into small, round shops. There is a barber’s with just enough space for one chair. Several butchers’. A grocer’s where you can buy pickled cabbage from a single barrel. A kitchen for soup with a cast-iron stove, and, outside on the paving stones, three wooden tables with benches. At one of the tables sits a man with slightly dejected shoulders, long hands and a high forehead made higher by the fact that he is going bald. His spectacles have thick lenses. He looks at home here this morning, although he is not Polish.

John Berger, Landcapes: John Berger on Art, page 5

KOMO

Proveo sam u Komu ceo dan. Prijalo mi je da ne budem na brdu, u sumi, taj jedan dan. Video sam taj mali grad, i ljude koji tu zive. Lep grad. Obisao sam veci deo grada Komo. Neke zene su bile lepe, neke nisu. Bilo je i bogatih i siromasnih ljudi, video sam prosjake na ulici, i video sam coveka u pratnji dvojice telohranitelja. Ljudi su se na ulicama okretali za njim. Bio je to neki poznat tip sigurno, ali meni to nije moglo nista da znaci, nisam ga poznavao. Skitao sam gradom i vracao se u onaj isti bar, na vino i sendvice. Svideo mi se taj bar. Svi su se tu poznavali. I unutra su bili i bogati i oni koji to nisu. Bogati su placali pice svima za sankom, u tom baru. Meni nisu. Bio sam nov. Mene nisu poznavali. I to mi se svidelo.

Srdjan Valjarevic, strana 117

A TALE OF TWO CITIES (excerpt)

A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell… A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices—voices of men, women, and children—resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the wine was gone, and the places where it had been most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting, set it in motion again; the women who had left on a door-step the little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine… One tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees — BLOOD. The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.

Charles Dickens, Ch 5 - The Wine Shop, page 432

BENTO’S SKETCHBOOK (excerpt)

The Prado in Madrid is unique as a meeting place. The galleries are like streets, crowded with the living (the visitors) and the dead (the painted).

But the dead have not departed; the “present” in which they were painted, the present invented by their painters, is as vivid and inhabited as the lived present of the moment. Occasionally more vivid. The inhabitants of those painted moments mingle with the evening’s visitors and together, the dead and the living, they transform the galleries into a Rambla.

John Berger, page 93

POVRATAK

 Vratio sam se i zatekao grad
razoren, zgrade i ulice zbrisane
u neidentifikovanoj nepogodi.
Na njihovim mestima stoje duplikati,
rugaju se svojom slicnoscu
sa gradom u kome sam ziveo.
Zaverenici se smeskaju,
glume zivot,
hodaju kroz avetinjski grad
preruseni u sebe same,
kao ozivljeni eksponati
u muzeju vostanih figura.
Izbegavam njihove poglede
dok mi se ljubazno javljaju
i zovu me da svratim.
Plasim se zarobice me
reci da ostanem
u ovom nepoznatom gradu,
u ovoj kuci
po kojoj kao slepac tumaram,
iako sve stoji netaknuto.
Hoce li mi oni poverovati,
hoce li se uvrediti
ako im kazem da su svio ni mrtvi
i da se veceras plasim da zaspim
u krevetu pokojnika. 

 Ognjen Obradovic, Oticanja

NOTE

The characters in this story, the first of a group, are all inventions together with the personality of the narrator, and bear no resemblance to living persons. Only the city is real.

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, Justine: a novel, Preface