Why the eloquent description
you lay out of your city becomes
my own so very different city?
Are cities all that different? Why,
of course they are! And mine, I
swear, is so much better than yours;
my city, not that wonderful description
which sort of becomes mine, my own
city as I listen mesmerized to you and
your voluptuous description of what is
distinctly not my city and yet I can see
my city’s trees, my trees, and the post
office you describe is also my very own,
either the one on Pine Street just a block
or three from Polk or the one rather hidden
in the side alley off Market as one passes
Van Ness (oceanward). The museums you des
cribe are the ones in my everyday horizons, the
ones I have failed to enter, no adventuring in
these museums for years, but not quite as many
as the years since I have crisscrossed the
galleries in your city, which is a truly fine
city filled with really respectable museums,
I’ll be the first to concede, and yet, and this
I recall, wondering why it is long since I have
ventured within either of this, my fair city’s
museum doors just for a bit of an adventure,
our museums are far superior to those of yours.
We needn’t continue this line of thought as we
both know our own personal feelings on such
matters and may never reach any agreement
except that we live in our separate cities that
we love and each of us know, me especially,
how much more superior that the city and its
architecture and art and inhabitants and person
alities are than those that exist within yours.
I’ll return, perhaps often, to your city, to examine
these inferiorities, learning so much along the way
of how I live in the fairest city by far, the fairest, I’d
say in the entirety of civilization. For what a fine and
immeasurably invaluable (though measurable enough
to know in relative comparison to yours) city it is that
I think we can agree this is. The best, really. And in
my heart of hearts I know that you wholeheartedly agree.
as the years since I have crisscrossed the
galleries in your city, which is a truly fine
city filled with really respectable museums,
I’ll be the first to concede, and yet, and this
I recall, wondering why it is long since I have
ventured within either of this, my fair city’s
museum doors just for a bit of an adventure,
our museums are far superior to those of yours.
We needn’t continue this line of thought as we
both know our own personal feelings on such
matters and may never reach any agreement
except that we live in our separate cities that
we love and each of us know, me especially,
how much more superior that the city and its
architecture and art and inhabitants and person
alities are than those that exist within yours.
I’ll return, perhaps often, to your city, to examine
these inferiorities, learning so much along the way
of how I live in the fairest city by far, the fairest, I’d
say in the entirety of civilization. For what a fine and
immeasurably invaluable (though measurable enough
to know in relative comparison to yours) city it is that
I think we can agree this is. The best, really. And in
my heart of hearts I know that you wholeheartedly agree.
