A City Remembered

The poem

Unlovely city, to which few tourists come With squinting cameras and alien hats; Left under a cloud by those who love the sun And can afford to marry – a cloud of bits Of soot more myriad than gnats, a cloud Of smoke and rain, an insubstantial threat Whose colour is the pigment of long wrath, I think of you, surprised to find my blood Warmed by a wry desire, a kind of love. I see the trams, like galleons at night, Go rocking with their golden cargo down The iron hills; then hearing that bold din My other senses frolic at a fête Of phantom guests – the smells of fish and chips, Laborious smoke, stale beer and autumn gusts, The whispering shadows and the winking hips, The crack of frosty whips, brief summer"s dust. And in that city through a forked November Love, like a Catherine-wheel, delighted me And when it sputtered out, hung charred and sombre, The city flavoured my delicious misery. And so I guess that any landscape"s beauty Is fathered by associative joys Held in a shared, historic memory, For beauty is the shape of our desires. My northern city, then, by many called Ugly or worse, much like an aged nurse Tender yet stern who taught one how to walk, Is dear to me, and it will always have A desolate enchantment that I"ll love.