The Wall

Those years in the dark
with our rattling spraycans

scrawling out curses
at that half of the City

erased on the opposite side-.
As if they could read

our words through the concrete,
as if what we wrote

was for them, not for us.
Soon, the wall was a thick

net of language-a false
horizon-it built toward us

in minute layers that shifted
as we shifted, it mirrored

the flashing of our voices.
On the other side, they, too,

were writing us, and then
it was unclear

what we should hate more-
those who were sealing

us up in their dialect,
or the tangle we’d made

that had come to replace them.
In the night we could hear

the hiss of their paintcans,
the sloshing of their buckets,

and we tried to imagine
the words that those noises

conveyed. Who were we
but our language

kissing against theirs
through the wall? Who

were they but the language
we met in the night

for a kiss? So that now,
since the wall no longer exists

and each of us has a piece
preserved on his desk

as a paperweight, I must say
I’m not sure if this I

came from our side or theirs-
which word it belonged to,

which thought it once held
like a roof at its capital.