The Stranger

Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart / of the street to the river / walking the rivers of the avenues / feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt / watching the lights turn on in the towers / walking as I’ve walked before / like a man, like a woman, in the city / my visionary anger cleansing my sight / and the detailed perceptions of mercy / flowering from that anger // if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light / and hear them talking a dead language / if they ask me my identity / what can I say but / I am the androgyne / I am the living mind you fail to describe / in your dead language / the lost noun, the verb surviving / only in the infinitive / the letters of my name are written under the lids / of the newborn child