By Nancy Eimers

Night and the City (1950, dir. Jules Dassin)

Harry Fabian, stop running across the screen and into the distance
made of alleys and doorways, streets crisscrossing streets
of neon signs with their loops of the cold light any city knows—
stop, because you will have to run again at the end of the movie
that ends you by throwing your body into the river and having a cigarette
flicked after it. How traitorous your flapping coat and trousers and
your comical two-toned shoes. And yet you believed them.
Critics say this movie is modern because it is tough on its characters,
Harry having a “slimy glee,” and yet how his horsy teeth protrude pathetically
when he smiles, how his face sweats each time nobody lends him money,
how the dapper suit comes unbuttoned and gapes and dirties as he runs
toward the end and his eyes look horrified as if he’d found himself beneath a bridge
beyond which it is night and the city burning. This man could push his girlfriend down
in the street and leave her there—in the layers of grays and grims, no white—
or maybe terror is pitiable beyond mercy just for a moment,
maybe each alley is a doorway hoping St. Augustine would even now say brother,
let us long, because we are to be filled…. Longing has one ending,
longing has another. In one, the girlfriend is comforted by a friend,
in another the hiss of a cigarette tossed into water has the final say. Could Harry be said
to have a soul, even his clothing tries to make the man, and he inside
now frightened now upbeat, the and in one and two and three and four
has him running a last little while, if only as far as the bridge.

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Nancy Eimers is the author of Human Figures (New Michigan Press, 2022), Oz (Carnegie Mellon, 2011), and three previous poetry collections. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and she has been the recipient of a Nation “Discovery” Award, a Whiting Writers Award, and two NEA Fellowships.