Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

The busier a city, the greater my gratitude. So I have a love affair with the city of Montreal. While living in Vermont, I would visit twice a year, often more. The bustle of Montreal countered the loneliness born from seemingly endless, bleak winter days. The nearby presence of massive numbers of human beings, just over the Canadian border, was a kind of antidote. It was an easy fix, a way to manage that malaise and isolation which descend after so many dark days in rural New England.

A recovering introvert, I have come to relish the close proximity of human bodies, of seeing so many people at once, and bumping alongside them in Montreal’s famed underground city. I loved standing beside people while staring into a painting at Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts or applauding next to people at a modern dance performance. Old Montreal’s cobblestone streets and baroque architecture connected me to bodies no longer present, but whose history and spirits I felt.

This is how cities hold us, even through their façade of decay or luxuriant glass futurism. I love the beauty of natural spaces and will never jettison the sense of sacred communion there, but cities serve as staging grounds for my feelings of agape, the benevolence I feel from and extend to fellow human beings.

Today's poem is taken from a book set in my other favorite Canadian city, Toronto. It makes a case for the nuanced ways cities conform us into unsuspecting communities, for which compassion and love flow through, often at great speed.

from THIRSTY
by Dionne Brand

I

This city is beauty
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,
submerged landings,
I am innocent as thresholds
and smashed night birds, lovesick,
as empty elevators

let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in 
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle, gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held

the touch of everything blushes me,
pigeons and wrecked boys,
half-dead hours, blind musicians,
inconclusive women in bruised dresses
even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible
briefcases, how come, how come
I anticipate nothing as intimate as history

would I have had a different life
failing this embrace with broken things,
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain, would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates a breath

and this, we meet in careless intervals,
in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic 
conversations, lotteries, untranslatable
mouths, in versions of what we may be,
a tremor of the hand in the realization
of endings, a glancing blow of tears
on skin, the keen dismissal in speed

from THIRSTY by DIONNE BRAND from THIRSTY © 2002, Dionne Brand. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.