Caesarean state:
every roadsign a mirror
every town a suburb
 
                                            *
 
Magritte’s Saturn: all rings and no planet
 
the ever-provisional
coastline dreaming of the sea
 
                                            *
 
Maigret’s Liège stands in for itself
its anonymous crimes
sweepings from the poorhouse floor
 
Charleroi’s slow factories turn like the Ferris
wheel in The Third Man
 
                                            *
 
               Louvain, Gand, Anvers
river-cities face to face with themselves
               Leuven, Gent, Antwerpen
 
Bruges one long aftermath, held breath
 
                                            *
 
Bouillon to Blankenberg,
Martelange to Knokke
300 kilometres of frontier
united and untied
 
                                            *
 
From the citadel of Namur, Baudelaire’s Paris
appears in a cityscape by Rops: France doubled,
 
doubly not. The Meuse rolls through
as many names as it has valleys to run dry in.
 
                                            *
 
All has that faint emphasis, as if the place were in italics,
could look like elsewhere yet be nowhere else.