The Belgiad Poem by Patrick McGuinness

Caesarean state:
every roadsign a mirror
every town a suburb

*

Magritte's Saturn: all rings and no planet

the ever-provisional
coastline dreaming of the sea

*

Maigret's Liège stands in for itself
its anonymous crimes
sweepings from the poorhouse floor

Charleroi's slow factories turn like the Ferris
wheel in The Third Man

*

Louvain, Gand, Anvers
river-cities face to face with themselves
Leuven, Gent, Antwerpen

Bruges one long aftermath, held breath

*

Bouillon to Blankenberg,
Martelange to Knokke
300 kilometres of frontier
united and untied

*

From the citadel of Namur, Baudelaire's Paris
appears in a cityscape by Rops: France doubled,

doubly not. The Meuse rolls through
as many names as it has valleys to run dry in.

*

All has that faint emphasis, as if the place were in italics,
could look like elsewhere yet be nowhere else.