High over the lake
on autumn afternoons
gulls flutter
flutter?
They fly in lackadaisical
manner, not in any
formations or groups
The angels this afternoon
have been having a party
and threw confetti
Gulls flutter and soar
and glide above the lake
sidelighted by the afternoon
sun, lifted by the breeze
What do angels eat
at their gatherings?
What do they barbecue?
What do they roast
on a spit?
The city has flocks
of big
fat
finches
A factory on the far South Side
that turns out Scottie-dogs
dog after dog after dog
The forges blaze
through the night
Fresh-cast dogs clatter
onto the factory floor
Released into the parks
by vested City workers
the Scottie-dogs chase
finches pecking in the grass
The big fat finches fly away
The Scottie-dogs prance about
they howl and yelp
The police
knocked on my door last night.
I was pleased
they weren’t looking for me.
The doorbell rang and I got up
and looked through the peephole.
I told my wife, It’s the cops.
I opened the door and they
identified themselves. Hello, we’re
Chicago Police. They wore uniforms,
badges, guns, and bulletproof vests.
They had radios and batons and other
gadgets. Yes, I can tell, I said.
How can I help you?
They told me how. They asked
me what I knew about
the neighbor who lives below.
I told them what I knew,
which was nothing and a little more.
They asked me about
the neighbors next door.
I told them what I knew,
which was nothing and a little more.
They asked me about
the neighbors upstairs.
I told them what I knew,
which was nothing and a little more.
They thanked me for
my time and left. I watched
them out the window as they
walked away from the building.
I forgot to ask them, Hey, guys,
this building is controlled access—
how’d you get in here?
My wife said she thought
they may have had a passkey.
Maybe all the cops have
a passkey to all the buildings,
she said. Makes it easier.
I’ve lived my entire life
afraid to live and afraid to die
How does that become a poem?
It doesn’t contain any metaphor
No imagery
No beautiful language
It’s
No, it’s not even that
There’s a man in a room
and a light is on.
Things happened at night and
I don’t remember which of them
was real and was happening
outside my head. Someone was
trying to break in through
the back windows or the front
door. I got up in the dark
and went to my closet and pulled
my rifle out and walked down
the hallway in the dark and hoped
I didn’t shoot someone I wasn’t
supposed to shoot. I woke up with
my wife pounding her fists
against my chest and saying, No,
I won’t! No! And I grabbed
her wrists and she woke up.
You don’t have
what they want to buy.
You’re reading Thomas Aquinas
on the corporeality
of angels, spiritual substance
made manifest through form,
and not even you
will buy that.
It goes in the back room,
with the boxes of used
quill pens, and the jars
of cold and hardened
phlogiston.
Crowded back there.
Arson might be
the answer, followed by
a fire sale.
Hot embers for
a quarter, bowls
of ashes at
a dime a pound.
Edmund sat on the corner in front of the Fourth
Presbyterian Church. He rattled a battered
McDonald’s cup at passersby, Excuse me, could you
help me get a shower? Sir? Lady?
His eyes were tired, very tired. No one
stopped, no one dropped anything into
his cup. Someone had earlier,
I looked into the cup and there were
a few pennies, at least one nickel, and maybe
a dime. No quarters had been given that I saw.
I passed by him twice. I had other
business at the church. During
a break, I took a walk around
the block and saw Edmund a second time. I sat
down next to him and introduced
myself. It was a warm September
evening and the sun was still up,
though low and soon to set. I
asked him his name, he told me he
was Edmund. I shook his hand.
Before I go any further with
this—what is this? What do I
think I’m doing here? What did I
think I was doing when I sat down
on the curbing next to Edmund on
the corner in front of the Fourth
Presbyterian Church?
He told me he was homeless. He said
he’d been hit on the head with
a baseball bat, Here, he said, and he
showed me the place on the back
of his head. He said he’d been
a dealer, cocaine and heroin, and he’d
done time. I asked him if he was
clean and he said, Yes, I never used,
man, you can’t use it and sell it.
He said, I flat-lined for ninety-six
seconds, now I’m homeless and need a shower
and a place to sleep for the night.
I don’t know what I was
doing, I don’t know why I sat beside
him and talked with him, I’m no
saint, I’m not saving any part
of this world. I don’t know why
I’m writing this except writing stuff like
this is part of what I do. I gave Edmund
a twenty-dollar bill and told him, God
bless, and shook his hand again,
and don’t want you for a moment
to think I’m a good person for it,
I’m sitting here in this church at
a meeting of well-housed, well-fed people,
one of whom is me, and as far as I know,
Edmund is still sitting on the corner shaking
his McDonald’s cup, and even if he’s not and
that twenty helped him off the street tonight,
he’s almost certain to be back on the corner,
some corner, come tomorrow and the days after that.
When she stops talk
ing in the mid
dle of a sentence or even
of a
word
and looks at her plate
or the table
top or her glass or
a fork or who can
tell—
it means she remembers what was said.
When she sits with
her hand in her
lap and picks at
her cuticles—
it means she prefers to be the first to draw
the blood through fresh cuts, thank you.
When she holds her hands
lightly clasped together in front
of her chest as if
in prayer or supplication—
it means she remembers begging for it to stop.
When her fingers
curl into claws—
it means they remember trying to defend her.
When she sits and stares
at the wall or out
the window or out to sea at
the farthest point of nothing—
it means everything she sees is inside.
When she screams it means it’s
here again.
Lunch is a plastic cup of instant noodles.
Pour boiling water in the cup and let it
sit for three minutes. Be careful serving
it to children, it is hot. You can
eat it straight out of the cup.
I am not a child. The cup of instant
noodles is beef flavor and tastes
of salt. Its aroma is that of the vinyl
shower curtain that hangs in my
bathroom. The curtain came with
the apartment and is clean and white.
The cup of instant noodles was
purchased with other such cups as
part of a store of emergency
supplies in event of fire, flood,
earthquake, hurricane, insurrection,
coup d’etat, bridge collapse, shipwreck,
bankruptcy, injury, or disease.
The job is over and the money
is gone. The emergency is now.
The ship that was expected to arrive
in port today is gone, the news
just in of its loss, run aground
and broken on a distant reef.
The cargo was uninsured.
She knew
right away. He saw
it in the look on her
face. He never knew
how she knew. He rolled
away and said, Sorry.
I can’t
I can’t do this, she said. I can’t
—it will be six weeks before
graduation and I can’t. He told her
whatever she wanted to do,
he would be with her.
They saved their money.
There was no conversation
in the waiting room. He was
the only man. He went out
to the hall and lay
down on the thin carpet, out
of the way. He tried
to get some sleep.
It had been a long night.
She held a piece
of paper in her
hand, said, We need
to get this filled. Outside
the building, she held
a hand out to the wall
and steadied herself and bent
over and threw up. The sky
was overcast, the day warm.
He opened a can
of chicken noodle soup, diluted
it in the pan, heated
and stirred and ladled it into
a bowl. She sat at their
kitchen table and slowly
ate the soup. She said,
Thank you. He said, You’re
welcome. They never spoke
about it again.
There are matters of sidewalk
etiquette that now should be
addressed. Whom to say hello
to and whom not, and principles
of eye contact and gaze aversion.
The skinny old retired grey-haired
Professor of Avuncular Studies,
with his kind and gentle
smile and his friendly good
morning, to him you not only
can return the greeting, you
must. There are few ports
in the storm of the street.
Anyone else who says good
morning or hello, of course you
should return the greeting. If your
intuition tells you to initiate a
greeting, follow it; however, do not
speak to joggers unless spoken
to. They often are winded and are
concentrating on their own selves.
Do not speak to women unless
they address you first. Do not
make eye contact or attempt
to make eye contact unless they
address you first. Do not furtively
glance at their breasts as
they approach. That is a bad
habit and it must stop.
Make way for the cyclists
even when they are cycling down
the sidewalk under the sign
that clearly tells them they are
not to do that and can be
arrested, jailed, fined, and have
their bikes confiscated. They
are young and some of them carry
guns and they will shoot you down.
Wounded people, injured, sick, they sit
out front of the Rehab Shoppe on stone
benches and in wheelchairs. People
with no legs and with tumors and one guy
who’s lost his hands in one of the wars.
They smoke their cigarettes, cigars,
and pipes and say, What does it matter?
That we smoke, what we smoke, what
difference can it make? The guy who’s
lost his hands, others hold his cigarette
for him. They hold his glass when it’s
time to drink, and they raise voice in song.
Here’s to vodka, here’s to rum, we’ll drink them
up till kingdom come. Here’s to wine
and here’s to beer, sauce us now we’ve
gathered here. Here’s to whiskey, makes
us frisky, Irish, rye, or malted Scotch.
Here’s to gin and here’s to sin, and here’s
to one last bloody crotch. Last one
dry gets to mop up the mess.
There was only one cashier on
duty and she wasn’t
there. The manager was pissed
off and pushed the restocking
cart into one of the customers,
careful to avoid eye contact.
The automatic change dispenser
didn’t dispense any change.
The cashier arrived and told
the manager, You put it on
backwards. She unlocked her
register, rang up the customer’s
purchases, made change from
her own purse—Have a good day.
Foggy morning along a beach populated
by shadows. Two in the shallows,
man and woman, she giggles, No, it’s
not…. His voice low rumbling, she says,
Because, it’s because, that’s all….
Atop each breakwater a solo
shadow, one taking morning
exercise in front of a small
jumble of bikes, two others sitting,
legs dangling over the sand while they
face the beach and wait for
what they’re waiting for. In the park
behind them, three workers
in yellow vests shovel something
from the bed of a city truck.
Back up on the streets, parents
escort their children down designated
safe routes to the stops where
yellow buses wait to carry
them to their hot and crowded
schools. A childless young
couple open the trunk of their
sedan, load it with a blue
picnic cooler, her easel and paints,
his two sets of golf clubs.
The sun is rising and the fog
will burn off long before lunch.
Out back of the main building
in the hard-packed khaki dirt
there’s a long and narrow tin awning
supported on slender steel poles
painted a nubby industrial beige.
Young people wearing jeans or
cargo pants and white t-shirts
and protective helemts swing
baseball bats at each other, not
attempting to make contact and do
each other any harm. The supervisor
tells the visitor, It’s just a game
to develop their martial-arts
skills, see how they smile?
The visitor sees how they swing
their bats and sweat and dance
about in the dust, hears their
calls and shouts, notices a skinny
girls whose pointy breasts poke
against her shirt. He tells
the supervisor, This is bogus.
They should be making contact,
breaking bones and cracking
open skulls, develop some
real-life skills. Give me
a bat and I’ll show you how.
The visitor is given a bat
(the skinny girl’s?) and directed
to a place at the far end
of the awning. This is where
we do that, the supervisor says.
The visitor is shown how he
is to whale away at the fender
of an old red car, scratched
and dented and the metal showing through.
This is how we make our art,
The supervisor tells the visitor,
who begins hitting the fender
with the bat as hard as
he can. Damn, this feels good!,
he grins and checks his backswing
so he doesn’t accidentally hit
any of the t-shirted participants
who have gathered round to watch
and cheer him on. Look at him go!
Beyond the fender, shaded under a tree,
there’s a pond with tiny fish.
When any piece of gravel
or splinter of wood or flake
of paint falls into the pond,
the tiny fish dart to it and
gather round it for a moment,
their noses all pointing to it
and their bodies stretched
so together they look like
a momentarily undulating asterisk.
A moment later and they dart away.
Families gather in the small lakeside park
every evening. The parents and aunts and uncles
sit in folding chairs and talk. Someone grills
meats on a portable grill. Children play on the beach
and in the shallows. They squeal and scream
and laugh and shout and run around and dig
holes in the sand with toy shovels and their hands.
The children range in age from tiny
toddlers up to young teens. Missing are
the older teens. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen,
nineteen, into their lower twenties, they don’t
come to the lakeside park to be with families.
They do other things, rites of power and sex
and death. A seventeen-year-old boy was
shot last night just after midnight,
his body laid out in the street,
covered with a sheet by police.
Eight dollars is the cost of admission to Greenwood Beach.
Seven dollars and a quarter is the federal minimum wage
for hourly workers under certain circumstances. The state’s
minimum is eight and a quarter. These are the wages
beneath which it is considered no worker could be justly paid,
unless that worker is a tipped employee dependent upon
the largesse of drinkers and diners sated with food
and beverage. Or unless the worker is an intern—
interns can be had for free—or a migrant farm worker,
shuffled from field to field, sleeping in a shack, drinking
tepid water from a rusty bucket—or an illegal immigrant
shoehorned two dozen to an apartment, never let out except
to be taken to the job, working sixteen hours a day
for room and board, exhausted sleep filled with American dreams.
A slender boy of about twelve
wears a black t-shirt
and black exercise pants with a silver stripe
up each leg like a cavalry trooper’s pants.
He has a stick about as long and curved
as a cutlass. He stands lakeside
at the water’s edge. Waves that reach
to his knees and sometimes up his thighs,
he slashes at them with his cutlass stick
as they come in, wave after wave after
wave after wave, they don’t stop,
he can’t defeat them, can’t drive
them back. With each slash he
gives a high-pitched yelp, but even
these cries don’t stop the lake.
The gulls circle above the lake,
searching for supper. They eye
the clear waters below, spot
fish, pause, turn, empty the air
from under their wings in a fall
that looks as if their wings
have suddenly broken, hit the
water beak-first, dive to catch
their meal, come back up and beat
their way back into the sky,
shaking the water from their wings
in a quick shudder as they go.
It rained last night.
(This is not the weather report.)
Current conditions: the sun is soon
to rise and the cardinals chirp their high,
metallic, scrapy chirp that sounds like an effect
from German techno-pop of a generation
ago (Trans-Europe Express! First In, First Out!)
There is a man who goes every morning
and every evening to the lakeside park.
He has a black fuzzy-furred dog
who goes with him. The dog sniffs around
as dogs will do while the man walks slowly
and pensively, his head down to watch the lawn
he’s walking on, or up from time to time
to look out at the lake and its deceptive
horizon. Is he watching the lawn? When he’s
looking down, is he watching the lawn?
What does he look for out on the lake,
what does he see, is he looking for anything,
or is he looking for nothing, or is he
looking for the sky to open and show
him the way out? There’s no denying
he has about him an air of the sad.
I could ask him.
Hey, mister
mister
hey
Why do you seem so sad?
Did your wife die? I might be sad
if my wife died, at least for
a little while. I’ve never been
anything other than alone, so I suppose
I’d be fine after a while.
Mister
did you lose a child?
Did you lose your fortune?
Did you miss all the best chances?
Is your time running out?
Were you awake when it rained last night?
Do you know why the police cruiser
was stopped at the corner this morning?
(Neither do I, but I saw it and decided
to throw it in here with all this other stuff.)
I could ask him? Could I ask him?
Then what? If he tells me his truth,
is this still my poem?
Hey, mister
mister
I’m going to put you in my pome
you and your dog
right here in my pome
where I can call all your shots
and get them every one
right here with the techno-chirping birds
and the rain and the cops
it’s—oh, and my wife, she’s not dead,
and not all my children are lost,
not all my fortune’s been pissed away,
not every opportunity has been blown—
here is the one place I can call home.
Fat boys with the breasts
of pubescent girls
take off their shirts
do cannonballs off the dock.
Toddler soils his pants
squeals on the beachfront.
Auntie strips him down
washes him in the lake.
Devil’s darning needles
stitch the fading sky with
random dancing patterns
of appetite and death.
I’m Kelly. It’s an Irish name.
I’m black Irish. I’m not from
here. I’m from farther south,
from that part of town where
five people were shot in front
of the church last night. On the steps
of the church, they were just
standing there. Not hurting anyone.
You don’t have a gun, do you?
I don’t, either. People with guns
need to take lessons so they shoot
who they’re aiming at and not just
anyone. (I won’t mention it, but
I want to thank you for not saying
anything about how you can smell
the liquor on my breath. And the
sun’s just barely up.)
I come here and I sit and I look
at the lake and the sky
and the sun and it’s my peace.
It’s how I get my peace.
Are you a therapist? It’s going
to be hot today. My sister
tells me bring a bottle of water
with me when I go out. Ice-cold
water, a bottle. I’m very
religious. I have to start
my day soon. Go home and shower
and get dressed. Clean clothes.
I like the lake. The sky and
the sun. Bright yellow sun.
He told his wife,
When I scratch my face
I am scratching my face,
not making secret baseball signs.
When I say I’m going to clean the couch,
it’s not because I think
you “did something dirty” on it or to it
(no one says you did), it’s because
the generous people who gave it
to us—religious friends of
your sister’s—gave it to us because
their cats had ruined it by pissing
on it and it stinks. And I am
tired of the stink.
When I set up my stereo it’s to hear
my favorite music, not to spy on whatever
you are not doing—you are not doing
anything but staring out the window—
and certainly not to broadcast sounds
of screaming children. The screaming
children live right next door
and need no amplification by me.
There are other things
he might have told his wife,
but after he had told her these things,
he had had enough.
Evanston is a town that sits
on the left shoulder of Chicago, facing up
(right shoulder if you’re facing down).
It is protected by an asphalt moat patrolled
by civilian traffic, a vast cemetary where
fog twists around large monuments to people
barely otherwise remembered, and a train track
fatally electrified and lined by deciduous jungle.
Once the visitor passes the city’s defenses
he (or she if she’s a she) finds himself
in a pretty little city almost as pretty
but not as fragile as the words “pretty
little city,” complete with tall trees,
three-story buildings, squirrels, rabbits,
university professors and students, joggers,
dog-walkers, cyclists, all sweating, some
discussing topics of interest. The cars are
all relatively new and not ostentatious,
though the same cannot be said
for the houses. Construction is underway
in front of shops whose windows hold signs
reading, “We are still open.” Sunday mornings
find the pretty little city very quiet.
There’s a party in the alleyway every night.
It’s August, it’s hot, what’re you going to do?
Sit in your stuffy apartment, puny wall-unit
wheezing a lie of cool, refreshing air?
Watch some fast-food brain shit on the box?
Drink thin beer from cheap cans, scream at the wife
who screams at the boy while the baby
screams at everyone? Fuck that. Get your ass
downstairs and out back to the alleyway. Bring your
30-pack of cheap beer and share it around.
Bring the wife and the boy and the baby,
the neighbors are grilling burgers and dogs
and the cars are idling, their doors open
and their sound systems thumping loud.
You didn’t ask—no one has asked
but this is why I’m afraid of black people:
I’m afraid of black people
because television shows, movies,
newspapers, magazines, and popular songs
have taught me that black people
hate me and want to hurt me
because I’m white and because being white
makes me guilty both of injustices
being committed now and injustices
that hang from our nation’s history
like a stinking dead albatross around
a maddened, decrepit mariner’s neck.
And I’m afraid because
I cannot understand
what it means to be an American
and be black.
The weeping man lied to God.
He—the weeping man, not God
(who may well be a she,
or an it, or all three, plus…)—
he is in the basement laundry room
pulling the clean, wet clothes
from the washer to put them
into the dryer, where they will
spin around for sixty minutes
and he is weeping, doesn’t matter
what he lied about.
Five dollars’ admission.
All the neighbors (who can pay) are there.
Canvas folding chairs (bring your own)
line the curbside along green parkways.
Dogs crap in those parkways.
The new kids on the block
are in attendance. They are middle-aged
and are me and my wife.
We are shy but determined,
frightened of people but resolved
to make our new beginnings here.
We set our canvas chairs
on the parkway behind some of our neighbors.
Introductions are made. We are all middle-aged
(the younger ones and their children
are down the street, closer to
the inflatable fun castle and the quoits).
There is a line of buffet tables and a
griller grilling meats (burgers, dogs) on a charcoal grill.
Canned and bottled beverages (non-alcoholic)
in an ice-and-water-filled tub.
A P.A. system, a host, a raffle (my wife
wins a bottle of wine), pre-recorded music
(late 60s to early 70s, the pinnacle
of post-war American culchuh).
The music is too loud. Conversation
is difficult. Later there’s a singer
backed by two electrified guitarists.
Early on, I stepped in dog shit.
Three times went down the street
to try and scrape it off my shoe.
Even a little bit of that stuff stinks,
and there was no hiding that this
new kid needed to learn
at least one new thing.
She doesn’t have
her great-grandmother’s childhood book
of stories and verse
her grandmother’s cast-iron skillet
her grandfather’s favorite glazed blue bowl
or even her mother’s hand-knit afghan
collection of imperial stamps and coins
rocks from the Garden of the Gods.
Her father collaborated with the enemy
fled with her mother and older brother
he was a baby
the battle was behind them
to either side in the middle distance
it sparked and spat.
The baby, her older brother (let there be
no confusion) died in the swamp.
Another child came, a sister
born in a refugee camp.
She blames herself for all of this
she knows it’s not her fault
she knows there’s nothing
she could have done, it was all
before her. She sits in her house,
it is quiet now,
just another day to journey
from sleep to sleep.
Boys gone wilding in the night
have torn these branches down.
Beat each other bloody with the splintered ends.
Beat their girls, their lovers and their children.
Broken bones, bruises, contusions, lacerations, punctures,
abrasions. Branches litter the breakwater.
Leaves surf the waves. The lake is churning
this morning, waters muddy.