Misreading the Signs

Cities aren't grown villages or underground maps
that lose their colours in the night --
direction matters, not each crooked street.
At night there's no sun to lead you
but satellite dishes all point in one direction.
Rivers help too, giving cities plots to remember,
illustrated by pavement artists: imitators and begging realists.
In these cloistered Amsterdam canals you can't see
the sun's reflection unless, like Vincent, you set
your easel up on bridges, blocking the way. Even he,
when painting a whore, had to show if she was blonde,
if her nails were varnished. Words are too significant,
too few, unable to describe without pointing or denying,
their meaning flicked like abacus beads as we scan.

Sheltering from the rain, I'm led round canvasses.
Psychologists, tracking eyeballs, have confirmed our
predestined route from faces to vanishing points and groins.
Suddenly in front ofWoman with a Water Jug , loss depth-charges
the past to the surface. Causality becomes pattern, a loss
of narrative where viewpoints fail to accumulate - Vermeer's
yellow moment expands to fill a postcard, calendar or jigsaw.

I tail the gallery tour through windowless rooms
to the exit and the ice-cream vans, the lowlands where Descartes
and Spinoza fled, their faith but thin disguise.
Looking about, still lost, I see a roadsign saying
it's not quarter past six so instead I walk straight
back into the citythat I'll learn to love. It's no longer raining,
just dripping from the trees. It's not too late.

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tpl@eng.cam.ac.uk