She Is A City (Revised)

(Revised, with thanks to Edgar Gabriel Silex for his comments.)

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I love her when she is Washington D.C.,
tangled as a budget bill
wrapped in backroom deals;

love her when she is Seattle
full of homeless and
resigned wet;

love her when she’s New York City,
beating me hard,
keeping me up all night.

On the days when she is Boston
I can’t decide: which part of her
do I like best, which do I fear most?

One day I hope to find she has become
Redemptia, that no one has founded yet;
I want to walk its streets at a loss

to understand
its neighborhoods,
how it was built, how it grew.

I fear one day I will learn that
she is and has always been Angkor Wat
or Babylon, swallowed, abandoned

to jungle or sand, streets only memories,
walls nubs of remainder and lost glamour,
and no way at all to rebuild her.