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can count on the neighbor’s cigarette,
    and children flock to our street, sweet things.

    We don’t turn anyone away.

III

T HE B OOK OF D ISSOLUTION

    Because it is an uninhabited place, because it
    makes me hollow, I pried open the pages of
    Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories
    absorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-
    oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.
    Vines knock and enter through shattered drop-
    ceilings, glassless windows. Ragwort cracks the
    street’s asphalt to unsolvable puzzles. What lives
    upon its own substance and dies when it devours
    itself? The question shrinks and sticks between
    my ribs with toughness. The plaster flowers I
    collect in my pocket don’t travel well, crumble
    to dust. Even the rigid balustrades splinter and
    cave in. What shall come to pass? Chaos of
    lathe and plaster, baseboards and mold. The
    wood that framed rooms is bulldozed is cited is
    picked clean is abandoned is a prairie where a
    neighborhood once stood. Fire is a force for good
    in this place; the later it is put out the better;
    there will always be something left over. Trees
    grow thirty feet up through a gaping hole left by
    skylights collapsed in the heat of flames. Burn
    scars on cement where scrappers torched the
    last bits of plastic off copper wire spell out code
    that reveals what the world will look like when
    we’re gone. I have been unoccupied I have been
    foreclosed I have been vacant for a long time.
    Everything of any real value has been looted:
    my pulse, my breath, my hereafter. The most
    intimate place of all in this city of sadness is the
    distance between sounds: testifying pheasants
    and wild dogs, amens of saws, amens of
    sledgehammers. I am a house waiting to fall in on
    itself or burn while a homeless man walks down
    the middle of the street pushing a baby stroller
    full of sheet metal ductwork. An enclosure is
    the most difficult thing to steal so I’ll follow
    him and then I’ll know where to go from here.

P OST -I NDUSTRIALIZATION

    This is the single greatest story of American success:
    God Bless Our Customers. Fax & Copy Here. Beer
    & Wine & Liquor. Gifts & Perfumes & Lottery & Cell.

    Check Cashing & Quick Weaves. I saw signs and wonders,
    wonders and signs, but no one lugged me from the rubble
    with an outstretched hand. I did not rise from the ashes.

    In 1914, Henry Ford offered five dollars a day to the men
    who assembled the Model T. And the dead were judged
    according to their works. What kind of people

    could walk away from something like this?
    All of us. We like space, we like cars. A city
    in decay releases energy: rebar, sirens, razor-

    wire, spray paint, a guy pushing a shopping cart
    down 2 nd Street with a vacuum cleaner in it. Destroy
    what destroys you. Then, from the ruins, Hallelujah.

    This is happening all over the country. Detroit as cipher
    of decay: mirror mirror. And I saw the dead, small and great,
    stand before the city. Their fate was tagged on slabs

    of plaster with Krylon. And the devil that deceived them
    was cast into the lake of fire. And the books were opened.
    And the books were burned.
What must I do to be saved?

    Photograph the bricks peeling slowly off the rear
    of the Wurlitzer Building, threatening an alley
    where a squatter hangs one pair of shorts

    and one shirt on a makeshift clothesline tied
    to a busted fire-escape running along a wall
    which has a single red heart painted in every

    cracked window. Those Wurlitzer organs
    had such lifelike power that they made people
    who never sang when they were alone

    join in chorus with others. This is where
    we start: with great terror,
    with miraculous signs and wonders.

B Y O THER M EANS

    My body as terra nullius. My body as celestial. My body as dysfunctional.
    This water-damaged waiting room. This explicable flood of couples with
    expectant grins. The grim single-mother with hair past her waist and
    plastic Dollar Tree bag as purse. The girl in the hallway