Donna Stonecipher
MODEL CITY [1]
It was like driving out of your way to visit a model city built next to an iron ore mine, a paragon of city planning, its well-spaced streetlamps casting small cones of light upon the darknesses of human life.
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It was like arriving in the mostly abandoned model city and being unable to discern the features that make it a model city, for all its features have been incorporated into other cities, because they were so model.
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It was like driving down the boarded-up main street of the model city with your windows down, and suspecting that you have come to the wrong model city, that the new model cities, the right model cities, lie far off.
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It was like standing in a cone of light cast by one of the well-spaced streetlamps of the wrong model city, mined of all its ideas, its boarded-up windows hiding the long-forgotten aspirations for a model life.
MODEL CITY [2]
It was like passing by a small shop under an overpass one afternoon in an unfamiliar part of a familiar city, and noticing that every single article for sale in it is blue.
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It was like stopping in one’s tracks outside the shop of blue articles and leaning in to gaze closer through the vitrine, over part of which is reflected the blue sky.
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It was like gazing transfixed at the blue articles, at the sky-blue, royal-blue, forget-me-not-blue pencil sets and messenger bags, brushes and egg cups, detaching themselves from the reflection of blue sky.
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It was like knowing that this shop would never have appeared in the familiar part of the city, and knowing that familiarity with the blue shop will only make this part of the city even more — perpetually — unfamiliar.
MODEL CITY [3]
It was like walking home from a movie theater with your loved one, both of you unable to stop singing “Wie einst, Lili Marleen...” “Wie einst, Lili Marleen…” when you pass a poster for an exhibition on the città ideale.
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It was like going back home to your small apartment and remembering having read somewhere that Leonardo da Vinci wrote somewhere that small rooms strengthen minds, while large rooms weaken them.
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It was like turning on the television and idly sketching a new città ideale, one in which all the rooms are so tiny that minds swell in them like da Vinci heads in drawings — large, correct, teeming with inventions.
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It was like making sure to draw at least one window into each room, so that nowhere in the città ideale could a person be put into a windowless room to be tortured by endless iterations of “Lili Marleen.”
MODEL CITY [4]
It was like standing on the street and watching a delivery truck drive down into an underground parking garage, watching it get smaller and smaller until it looks like a toy truck before it disappears.
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It was like watching the delivery truck drive deep down into the garage and then disappear into the darkness as the automatic gate at street level slowly lowers itself to the ground.
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It was like thinking that night about the underground parking garage and all the other underground garages in the city constructing a city as deep under the ground as the high-rises construct a city high over the city.
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It was like smoking a cigarette in one’s high-rise thinking about the three cities, each glittering with its own gravitational attraction, and then about the deliveries disappearing into the underground city.
MODEL CITY [5]
It was like strolling through a city with one’s loved one down a street parked with SUVs and horse-and-carriages, and noticing a pair of yoked horses nuzzling each other while the driver, in a velveteen cape, waits for trade.
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It was like reading affection into the velveteen nuzzling of the horses behind the SUVs and wondering, if one reads affection into the nuzzling of the yoked horses, is affection there?
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It was like secretly wanting to take a ride in one of the carriages through the city, but instead decrying the plight of the yoked horses and scorning the shabbiness of velveteen anachronism.
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It was like looking into the horses’ brown velvet eyes and thinking about the horsepower of the SUVs, while walking down the street holding hands with one’s loved one — glad not to be yoked.
MODEL CITY [6]
It was like reading in a book about the model city la cité industrielle, in which all buildings shall be made of concrete, all corners carefully rounded, and each bedroom shall have at least one window facing south.
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It was like reading that la cité industrielle should be situated exactly between a mountain and a river, and that it should have plenty of schools, but no churches or courthouses.
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It was like thinking about the west-facing window in your own bedroom and its potential sunsets blocked by the new hotel that rose, story by story, across the street almost as soon as you moved in.
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It was like thinking about how la cité industrielle was never built, but the hotel blocking your sunsets was, how hotels will always be built, blocking sunsets, squaring corners, and placing windows facing all cardinal points.
Copyright Donna Stonecipher 2014
Donna Stonecipher is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Cosmopolitan. She lives in Berlin.