urban: of, pertaining to, or designating a city or town. -mancy: a combining form meaning “divination,” of the kind specified by the initial element.

I remember when I first started travelling to Portland my poetry was filled with images of the city: Forbes Meats, MECA, the Public Market, the Maine State Pier. Each name was enough, standing alone in time like the Gardens of Babylon. Every homeless person was a drunk prophet or a radical madman crushed by the weight of modernity. Seperate but obsessed I walked the big streets and took pictures from the tops of parking garages. Now less excites me but I notice more, the quiet whispering, dialouge on a bus between strangers, the stained glass heraldry above the windows of the smoke shop at the top of Forest Ave. Now I take the shortcuts, footpaths, alleyways and the city does not open up before me but instead I wander and read the writing on the walls. It has changed and I have changed, like old friends we do not talk much but instead exchange silent glances. Our in-jokes are old and in truth I have forgotten most of them. They have painted over the walls I fell in love with when I was eighteen and changed the locks on all my old apartments. Buried deep in the back of the closet, in the dustiest crawlspaces, there are secrets from so far ago, precious treasures, histories, quiet little pageants of our struggle and our fall. Etched in the eves of the Abyssinian, forged in the iron of our sewer grates, under the peeling layers of paint on our easternmost wall of our city by the sea.