Max Reif's "Cities" begins like a casual announcement: "I'm working on a major work on cities." The poem that follows seems to be a sketch for that grand project, or perhaps the project itself, squeezed into a few stanzas. Its claim is that cities are "all the same, and different," and the dash after "different" leaves a pause in which the reader has to work out how both can be true. The poem's answer is that every city holds the same human feelings, hope and grief above all, in different architecture. Those feelings are what we carry away, as "the ideal remnants of our experiences, / Our loving goodbyes to this world."
The poem is built on distance. To "know cities," the speaker says, you must leave for a year, two, maybe five, and go to a desert or a mountaintop. There the human voice gives way to the eagle's cry, written as a stretched "Creeeeeeee" that makes the reader hear the empty air. Only then can you "come back and see." The repeated "come back" gives the passage a rhythm of departure and return, which is also the rhythm of learning anything properly.
The poem then looks at the skyline twice. From far off the buildings are "perfect abstract sculptures, / Monuments of intellect soaring, / Needle-spires towards God." The vocabulary here is clean and geometric. Up close, the same towers turn into "citadels of tears, / Penthouses of pent-up emotion." The echo of "pent" in "penthouse" is a small piece of wordplay that fits the idea well, since the luxury apartment and the bottled-up feeling both sit at the top of a building and press against its walls. Earlier, the towers are "crying out loud to the clouds," so even from a distance the buildings seem to be sobbing. The poem never suggests the beauty is false. It says that beauty belongs to distance, and compassion belongs to closeness.
The middle of the poem is its most honest stretch. The speaker says "I don't hate these cities," then compares them to "giant beasts in photographs, / In zoos, in the wild," admired but approached "with caution." Then the tone darkens. Cities become "yawning traps," with "pools of tears on each corner" and strangers' eyes "inviting me / To orgies of hate and terror." This is strong language for a poem that sounds so mild, and it shows how uneasy the speaker is. He goes into cities only "when I have something to do," like someone crossing a field where something large might wake.
After this, the poem shifts from image to belief. "There are no / Random pathways in this world. / All pathways are pathways of learning." The statement is plain and could easily sound like a slogan. What saves it is the next idea, that "each person's life is a path," so a city is millions of paths crossing. That leads to the poem's most memorable warning: "In cities we must tread lightly, / Or we will step on other people's hearts." The metaphor turns crowded pavements into something fragile. The next line, "Then we will see things / We are not supposed to see," is deliberately vague. I read it as the private pain of strangers, which a careless walker blunders into.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. Its stanzas vary in length, and its lines are short and close to speech, like someone thinking aloud on a walk. The effect is intimacy, though the abstract passages ("Ideal City," "intellect," "pathways of learning") sometimes feel less vivid than the images of tears and spires around them. Repeated words, mainly "cities," "clouds" and "tears," hold the poem together in place of a rhyme scheme.
The final stanza returns to the opening ambition, now gently deflated. The speaker will "know you a long time yet" and promises to respect the "enormity" of cities. "Someday I will graduate from your school" casts the city as a teacher rather than an enemy or a monument. That humility is the poem's real significance. It avoids both the usual praise of cities as glittering and the usual complaint that they are cold, and offers instead a view of the city as a place where we learn to be careful with one another.