I have been alone in the city, though not often lonesome. I walk the streets at night, combing the trash left outside to fester. A child’s boot, a box of old 45s. Detritus of eras before the city’s making. Clumsily-sewn children’s primers fill the libraries, and ledgers from defunct businesses.

Too much in the desert night. Split-faced man has built his love this city in the desert. The fires at night, above the refinery. Split-faced Man of the invisible eyes. His love crooks her automaton neck. Her name: Esmerelda. Esmerelda, where have you left your eyes?

All I know about Split-faced man fills a book, but the book is not long, and it is often illegible.

In Esmerelda’s stomach, a distillery. In Esmerelda’s hand, a rusting key ring. So much copper tubing. Esmerelda of the iron hair. Weeping like an air raid siren. Esmerelda like a Grand Coulee Dam.

Split-faced man an avalanche of diamonds. Split-faced man a knife. Split faced man with his arsenal of fact: tells me the number of times each city bus tire turns. Split-faced Man has no memory, or is all memory and no flesh. Our sorrow is only the sorrow of lost love: ergo it is not sorrow at all.

Split-faced man’s city is a refinery of memory. Only the utilitarian remains.

In the mysteries of the city, my hands extinguish in the coldest room. Esmerelda was my sister, I tell you, before I made her out of metal. It’s true I made the automaton, I set her before the Split-faced Man. I made the Split-faced Man into a city in my mind, permeable to motor-cars. The songs from their speakers slapping at glass and metal walls. Cinderblock and street slang. Situations will arise.

Split-faced man builds a city like an apocalypse; streets tunneled by desert wind. Below the wind, earth tunnels lined with brass. A city of self-illuminating gas. And Split-faced Man, sighing through the wall of her body.

I have invented new instruments to speak to you. Esperanto of the heart. To be ambushed by a radio from an earlier decade. An army of bells advances toward a distant dusk; a cherry tree is taken apart by the wind.

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