​Michael Hettich            (Barbra Nightingale)
The Problem of Analysis

This city is so large, no one could possibly
walk every street in one lifetime, even 
walking every day. In fact, this city 
has grown so massive it might not even be
a city, properly speaking, but more like
the nerves and atoms in an ordinary brain
of someone who happens to be sleeping, let’s say--

and if we could sneak inside her as she dreams, 
stilling our breath not to wake her, we might 
look more closely up and down the meandering
alleys, peer along the hallways and alcoves
of the buildings inside her, of the lives there—as now, 
through a half-opened window on the second floor 
a young man sits reading. When his phone rings, 
he answers, distracted, looking down 
at the street, where a beautiful woman is walking 
a dachshund who poops in the middle of the sidewalk 
while she pretends to examine her manicure,

which infuriates the young man, who tosses his phone 
and leaps through the door to the street, to give her 
a piece of his mind—which makes this a good time 
to move in deeper, into another neighborhood, 
where an old man who looks like a dog in a bathrobe 
is pouring milk into a fish tank 
crowded with pollywogs, or to a public swimming pool
where children are engaged in a race to see 
how fast they can drink all its water. At the bottom

something is moving. And one boy, a show off, 
keeps jumping from the diving board, trying to swim 
to the bottom and touch that shape—whatever 
it is—before it lies still. On another street,
trains full of feathers fly past waiting rooms;
someone gathers spider webs to make a violin
while caves are being dug in the ground behind the bleachers
by girls who were cheerleaders before they grew moss;

and still we move deeper, stealthily, growing
harder to see as it grows harder
to see ourselves anywhere, until we can’t help
becoming more like the trees and birds 
that sang here a thousand years ago than we are 
like ourselves, dear city of the inner life, 
until we are less than a smidgen of sap 
that might once have quickened a now- extinct species 
of flower that smelled like the sky, deep 
in the layers and folds of our memories, where 

we’re nothing like ourselves, where bees still gather
pollen with a buzzing that fills the afternoon
wherever that afternoon is, and pollinate
other long-extinct flowers to make
honey as sweet as this brief time we’ve been given

to breathe.