A sharp little mountain peak

capped with bare rock draws hikers.

Halfway up, I unfold a map.

A complex of dense modern towns

straddles a narrow green river

with only two or three bridges

in twenty miles of urban mass.

Parade City, one of those towns,

consists mainly of an open space

ringed by streets named for generals

like Germanicus, Kosciuszko, Grant.

Folger is warped with factories,

big crosshatched rectangles hogging

the good land by the river. Stevens,

named for the poet, makes a snarl

of difficult intersections

that look impossible to pass,

much like Reading, the poet's home town.

I reach the apex of rock and stare

into the valley and suffer

vertigo as salty as the sea.

What if I've imagined a town

called Stevens, and another

called Parade City, and a third

called Folger? What if that tangle

of streets below is actually

Reading, Pennsylvania? What if

this sharp little peak is a spur

of an ordinary coal ridge

in the heart of which a fire has burned

for almost a century? Dizzy

with my own effects, I lean

over a drop of several hundred

feet and force myself to vomit,

but nothing comes up. Nothing

except the conviction that the map

folded in my pocket hasn't lied,

and the town of Stevens lies below,

an actual place of people and things

on which I'm trying to bestow

everything that's troubling me.