From I Am A City Still But Soon I Shan’t Be by Roger Farr. Published by New Star Books in 2019.

A murder of crows dropping down from the sky

    a passage from some poem I had written

years ago. We’d hooked up with that festive mob

    because we felt an affinity with its organs

of force. The citizens lined up on the other side of

    the street snapped pictures and gawked

as we consolidated our intimacies slipped off

    each other’s belts and shoes and set them

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In the grey plastic bins before passing through

    yet another full body scanner. That’s how

an assemblage penetrates flesh—how Woolf’s

    leaden circles could have dissolved in the air

—how mapping a city with paramours could be

    portrayed as an act of collective defence

not flâneurism—how the transition from window

   shopping to window smashing is theorized

‍

In Constant’s “Tract on Fenestration”—the creation

    of new openings in the urban labyrinth

to take the place of the old passages

    long since occluded by commerce and work

requires a move from the consumption of goods

    and services to their immediate

apprehension and redistribution—written in June

    1968. By Valentine’s Day 2010 our passages

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Were not about space but territory not politics

    but police borders bodies while debates

about acts were completely saturated in the icy

    Vancouver rain that fell for days and weeks

through the aftershocks. I remember the plum trees

    blossomed early that year. Certain residents

argued that their city was not ready for the violent

    aesthetic bloom of soft to dark pink

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Said such spontaneous eruptions were unseasonal

    should never have materialized before

the conditions were correct: Winter then Spring

    he said. Red then amber. Amber then green

followed by red again. These codes channel the flow

    of cargo traffic desire to its appropriate

outlets and ports. One who enters this City

    from the South must travel North along Clark

‍

Past Venables to Stewart then East into the Harbour

    just as the streams channeling beneath

the grid flow from the cemetery down Fraser

    and Main until they empty into False Creek.

At night the water here is still and dark reflects the

    towers of glass with their halogen bulbs until

the rain falls and the current swells to unsettle

    the image as though it were the city’s dream.