as from a citadel

for as long as i can remember a city has recurred in my dreams. it is always night there. towers and steeples coil into a tombstone sky. high-rises, some distant, some closer, glint rectangles from their monumental circuitry. walkways and viaducts, bridges and suspensions span the gaps in the air, weaving a cat’s cradle between the buildings’ fingers, and while there are alleys and lanes below, all activity takes place here in the heights.

the topography has had a skinful. at times tracks lead up between the houses to hills which cannot have foundations, and vast walls nod their sheer ashlar faces in oblique satisfaction. to move at all is to precipitate change.

plunging down from far above, faint vertical lines become scraggy masses of buddleia which become iron drainpipes leaking onto the cobbles. cantilevered platforms lunge out from all the wrong angles. balconies swing. tenements slouch. now and again, open spaces of some uncertain municipal purpose spread out into the dark as their gas lamps wink onto follies, pinnacles, and fine ornamental rails.

it is a lively city, for its many people go about a night-time business which is that of our day. we enjoy avenues lined with pots that spill strange flowers. we rush to appointments across the dark footbridges. we congregate along the pathways to drink and laugh, ducking under corbels, straddling buttresses.

there is magic here, and i hope the music has something of this city about it.