Woman with eye in her palm.
Oracle, tactile, tacit.
When it suits the city to be flesh, the city is flesh.
Man or woman, whatever pleases.
Woman with orb, eye in her palm
Life line, love line. A wink and then the eye opens
in the hand that reads all maps.

Citizens walk past her on street corners,
this body the city is wearing.
Her hand in front of her face, palm out,
eye in hand doubling over eye in skull socket.
Doubleness peering out as she reads us.

How does a mere citizen know the city's secrets?
The city is infatuated with my map—
its creases and hidden tributaries are newfound streets
that she has uncovered, in fact, created for me
from the accidents of my aging skin and its patterns of use.

Balanced delicately, she waits in various stances.
She is the hanged man:
arm twisted up behind her back,
one foot crossed behind her knee
She is the fool trying to cast me
as her ledge, no, her little dog.
I myself can't make up my mind
tracing the new middens and mews
that spring up everyday—
giant synapses where the flow of citizens
and the firing of memory are one.

She, the palm-eyed woman,
eye of the city—
body made flesh for delight.
Citizens fire back and forth as she relives the night before.
Each day they travel to her shudders—
One walked off the edge when her walls tumbled down,
shaking and open before me the body splayed.
All love should be like this: an escape and maze,
map and eye racing each other, tracing each other.
No, first the eye looks; no, first the map leads.