" Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled
and other known and unknown there, long sweet summer evening
on the tarred roof:
leaned back your head to the nightvault swarming with stars
the Pleiades broken loose, not seven but thousands
every known constellation flinging out fiery threads
and you could distinguish all
-cobwebs, tendrils, anatomies of stars
coherently hammocked, blueblack avenues between…
It was New York, the dream-site
the lost city the city of dreadful light…we
went striding the avenues in our fiery hair
in our bodies young and ordinary riding the subways reading
or pressed against other bodies
feeling in them the maps of Brooklyn Queens Manhattan… "
― Adrienne Rich , An Atlas of the Difficult World