Still
the city
is your body.

I thought perhaps
a bootscrape,
a shop
of drawered tea,
a room
in a museum
made of flowers
made of glass.

How odd the way
a man
can come to represent
a place,
the Longfellow
sloping
to the hollow
of your back.

Jo To Hopper, Circa 1951

Now and then a mansard roof,
a threshold to remind me
of watercolored Gloucester
and the portraits that we culled.

And how faithful were you
to Our Lady of Good Voyage,
her gables sagging out across
the golden timothy?

Lend me your lamposts,
your pickets, your nudes,
your House of the Foghorn
and your Lighthouse at Two Lights.

Forget the road to Annisquam.
You're tired, darling. Stay.
Record the light in a room from which
your exit would mean drowning.

Lissa Warren's poems have recently appeared in Quarterly West and Oxford Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College, and works in Boston for Perseus Books/Da Capo Press.

 Lissa

 Warren