It is your heartbeat, and yours,
Your breath,
the shuffling of your feet,
The rustle of the papers in your hands,
A cough, a sneeze, a clearing of your throat.

And it is the restless, constant motion of you, the city,
Your cars and buses,
Construction and heavy machinery,
Bakers’ ovens and chefs’ knives.

The sense of urgency
or exhaustion
or both.

The subway cars coming and going,
Making their mournful rising minor third on the rails,
Or the other tune, the rising minor seventh and then another major seventh,
Singing as they pull away, there’s a place…
and never finishing the phrase but
letting it collapse into a joyful cluster of dissonance.

For we are already here.
It is this place for us!
And this place has a music all its own,
In every atom,
In every soul,
In every brick,
In every chip of peeling paint or scored plaster,
In its ironworks old and new,
In its ghosts and its living beings,

And they are all us.