Who has engineered these drains, the ones that join to the lip of the curb, barbing our city streets, greened over? How precisely they lie at the backs, the waists, of these alleyways; and how streams of rainwater, punctured by persistent drops, urge themselves under my feet. The woman in the orange coat got to this corner by mistake; her face is peevish in the little light; her feet tap like a broken metronome. Under the city, in a realm of silence, water propels itself towards a vast and irreversible descent. The city moves towards spring, the celandine trees will put out their arbors, but the flow into vast and unseen pipes will retain its speed. The pinlights of the city overwhelm me, I who am seeking after a lost gentleness, after a rain that will stop itself up in the hills as words are absorbed in the flesh of the mouth.