Robert Pinsky: "The City Dark."

In the early winter dusk the broken city dark seeps from the tunnels up towers. And in
gusty allies, the mathematical vale of generation has lit its torches to light the rooms of
the made and the unmade. The two faded behind you and fore behind them in the matrix
widening into the past. Eight, sixteen, thirty two, many as to crystal dream sells
illuminating the city. Even for those who sleep in the street there are lights.

Like a heavy winter sleep, the long flint cold of the past spreads over the glinting dream
blisters of the city asleep or awake as if the streets were an image of the channels of time
with 64,128. The ancestral net of thousands, only a couple of centuries back with its
migrations and fortunes and hungers like an image of the city where the star dispelling
lights have climbed and multiplied over the tenements and outlying suburbs like a far past
of multitudes behind us in the glistering web of strands crossing thousands and tens of
thousands of lives coupled with their games, passions, misfortunes.

Somewhere in the tangled alleyways, a rip, somewhere a spirit diffuse the wing-like blind
along the stretched wire branching the dark city air or bundled under the streets coursing
surely to some one phase like an ancient song do, re, re, la, sol, sol. Somewhere --
somewhere recognition. Back here one died of starvation, here one thrived, descendant
the bitter city work and the shimmering maternal burden of music uncoiled outward and
the avenues through smoky bars by televisions, beyond sleepers. While the oblivion of
generation radiates backward and then forward homeward to the one voice or face like an
underground pool through its delicate light shaft moonlit, a cistern of light echoing in a
chamber cellared under the dark of the city pavement, the faintly glittering slabs.

This is related to our earlier conversation about the past and the future and each of us has
-- each of us who is made by two people, who are made by four, eight, go back a couple
of hundreds of years, its thousands of people. Eventually 10s and dozens -- many, many,
many thousands and you can bet that some are back there, you are the product of a rape.
Somewhere you're a product of a tremendous love match. Somebody died of starvation,
we are all descendant from kings. That many people fifty - sixty thousand, one of them
was a king, one of them was a slave and I suppose in relation to your question earlier
about finding an image for things with that sense of the immense wake that goes behind
any one person widening, widening, widening -- what is it like? All those people, it’s
like being an airplane over a city at night and you see all those lights, all the bulbs in the
city as if each light is a life and indeed in the city almost anything you name is happening
as you look down at it and that’s like your ancestry, almost anything in your name has
happened back there and I guess that image of the city and arbitrarily picking a light and
thinking what is in that room or is it a car or who is in the car? That’s like trying to
imagine what is behind you.