The city tells me       I’m alive so I’m alive

       I press my lips against its walls       bless me I’m drunk

on all its promises       & everything       I’ve wanted       the city opens up

       its fist & lets me see       the view is all American

fig. 1: what can I have       fig. 2: what will it cost me

       I’m filthy with desire       says the city I’m unfit & rich

with liberty       I tug my tether       the skyline gleams

       the windows glow their little mysteries       & a mirage

I fumble toward       I breathe it in

       my feet stick to the street       what if I might float

from the rooftops       in the city’s arms       & all these eyes on me

       don’t be sorry       whatever I may be today I’ll be

alive       & nothing hurts       the city holds me

I live in Cambridge, a town where the present is in danger of being drowned out by the din of the past. There is a distinction made here, not clear to outsiders, between the old colleges of the University—of which my own, at 420 years, is the youngest—and the arriviste institutions that have been around for less than a few centuries. In part this is a question of the physical presence of things—the lines and colours that are allowed to encroach upon the centre of town and those that are relegated to the periphery—but in part it is also about the density of information that greets the walker passing through town. The modern buildings, with their smooth exteriors and clean lines, tell us little about the cultures that made them other than their ability to streamline, to reduce form to function. The older ones, on the other hand, are a riot of representation—cabinets de curiosités made of stone.

Cambridge is a Renaissance town, and for all Shakespeare's confidence that his Sonnets were more permanent than "marble" and "the gilded monuments/ Of princes," his contemporaries were careful to set in stone what mattered to them. One of my favourite examples of Tudor stonework is a glorious carving in the small parish church of Burford, outside Oxford, of a monument to Henry VIII's barber-surgeon. The monument is the first three-dimensional representation of a native of the Americas in Europe, and its mason is clearly enthralled by the unfamiliar forms of this Brave New World, whom he has pinned among the scrolls and lion heads of a very Roman frame.

The presence of the past in Cambridge is not confined to images of the physical world: there are also the words that have also been scarred into the fabric of the town by the people who have been here before. The lapidary phrase on a sundial (Ut hora sic fugit vita: "As the hour flies so does life"); the "H" and "A" intertwined in the organ loft of King's College Chapel that bear witness to its erection during the brief years that Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn were still an item. In the early part of the twenty-first century, however, these voices slowly retreat into silence.

Somewhere between the shrinking of a stone's life in the face of astronomical timescales and the suspicion of authority with its monumentalising urges, we lost the will to write upon the world for future ages. We became, in a sense, Shakespeareans: believing that immortality is best attempted in the most ephemeral of materials, flimsy and delicate things whose decay is assured. Anything that survives does so by the sheer force of our attraction to it; each moment it lasts a triumphant riposte to the threat of time. As Shakespeare says:

Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I’ll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes.
                  (Sonnet 107)

To find out more about the marks our age is (or is not) making, I visit the venerable Kindersley Cardozo workshop, around the corner from my house, which is responsible for most of the monumental stonework in town. Along the way I pass this rather touching memorial, a neglected dog-watering trough erected by Prince Chula of Siam to "Tony," his companion during his student years.

The granite dog-bowl has a touch of that wild and nihilist bohemian whimsy that was the swan-song of monumental culture. It sets the claims of intimacy against the grander subjects of memory and asks us to imagine the world as a gallery of statues to fleeting moments. I am reminded of Ezra Pound's poem "Erat Hora," from around the same time, which gently mocks the pomposity of its own inscription-like title:

"Thank you, whatever comes." And then she turned
And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers
Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,
Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.

At the workshop, set up by David Kindersley and now run by his widow Lida Cardozo, I find Lida busy, deeply engaged with a client on the design of a headstone. I speak to one of the apprentice stonecutters, who tells me that they are one of the last workshops to hand-chisel their inscriptions. The more commercial outfit down the street sandblasts letters into rock through a stencil, a shortcut that has brought the price down far enough that they now make humorous signs to hang over bathrooms and such. I'm struck by how insulted I feel on the stone's behalf upon hearing this. It brings into focus the symbolic nature of inscription, an act of violence against a surface that forcefully resists, something that requires exertion and patience from the letter-cutter at a cost high enough to winnow away all but the most urgent records.

I run out of time to speak to Lida, but before I leave I see a headstone in progress that is poignantly similar to one of my favourite petroglyphs: a simple antelope, engraved into a Saharan cave in southern Algeria. It contains no words, but it says everything about the awe this culture felt at the relationship between animal, form and stone. The cutter clearly intuited that art lay somewhere in man's fight against the resistance of stone to taking on organic forms.

I run in to Lida a few days later as I am coming out of the library. She has a poetic soul, as I suppose anyone who spends so much time alone with her art must do. She is confident in her vocation—which is, as she sees it, to leave the world a little better than she found it (though she is aware of the irony that when people see her work they are seeing the effect of her taking something away). Yet she is unconvinced by my suggestion that we are an unmonumental people and takes me to see the nearby inscription that she and her workshop have just completed. It is a simple label chiselled into a band of Portobello stone that sits like a stratum low down in a brick wall of a building facing the library. Sitting as it does at shin height, it does not set itself up above the reader, as most inscriptions do, but rather encourages a bowing of the head or even kneeling; this stooping, however, is not an act of humility but of interest, like a child who bends down to watch a beetle emerge from its hole.

The inscription commemorates a forgotten field hospital that stood on the site between 1914 and 1919, in the tents of which some 70,000 First World War casualties were treated. It seems, in a sense, to capture the kinds of words our age will live on in: not brash statements of what we believe about the world, but a record of the fragments of the past that we feel may be slipping from our grasp. This is, I suppose, one of the major conclusions of Shakespeare's writings about the nature of beauty: just as this monument makes present to the reader something almost beyond retrieving, so beauty itself is nothing more than the anticipation of loss.

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
[…]
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
    This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
    But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
                  (Sonnet 64)

This monument is just such an instance of weeping to have that which we fear to lose, of the mutual orbit of beauty and oblivion. It is a monument to erosion, a writing upon stone that it is water.

It became something I didn’t recognize
20+ hours of labor and my vulva swelled up

until I walked like a plastic cowboy from a vending machine
forever ready to ride.

I don’t remember if doctors cut me or if I tore
and I didn’t care and don’t.

I’ve had no time for a hand mirror at my pussy.
I look for any instance of pleasure, listen to the letters

which flash only in the passing light: F A L S E because
everything I read said I was supposed to disarm.

We had a pretty good time together, when she wasn't
trying to kill me! but you can’t stop me when

I am so turned on by my own damn self and so

exquisite down there.

I saw a cow once on a hilltop casually stretch her neck
to face behind herself so that her left hind leg could scratch

her forehead with its hoof. I can’t emphasize enough
how casually she pulled this off, while obviously I was

blown away, having never seen a cow do that before
and having never given thought to whether it was possible.

Well, it’s possible. Things went back to normal after that.
Sometimes you feel like a change might be underway

but just wait it out: hands on the tabletop, eyes on the wall.
Meanwhile, it’s safe to say the cow has since died. Not

as a result of what I saw, but because I saw it long ago.
A cow’s life expectancy turns out to be fifteen years or so.

I’m still here. The day started off cloudy but the clouds
have drifted apart. To think too much of life would spoil it.