This is Ernest Yates's seventeenth volume of poems, and the fourteenth volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through Philadelphia streets.
So the city is a human habitat, a shared home. Still it's impossible to know Philadelphia's hundred neighborhoods; impossible as well to know their significance. What dreams, what flimsy speculations the imagination conceives?of itself and of its place?as it ponders this unknowable scene, this physical realm, this body of the city. By itself the physical detail speaks a dreary idiom, harsh and flat; but the wonder of its mystery may give rise to melody, a tuneful song of the possible. For whatever else it is, whatever it may be, over and over again the city proves it is there. Dreaming, we know it is there.
