Near Deventer

I looked up from some of my files and saw a little boy, through the train window. It was somewhere near Deventer, on the way to Berlin, and he tumbled towards the tracks a toddling mess of blond hair and fair skin, halting just beyond the shade of the tree where his family picnicked. He started to wave up at the train, in little floppy motions, and I felt something catch in my chest. I paused a moment and lifted my hand, but his little arms and little red shirt had already disappeared, still waving, beyond the horizons of my window.

I remembered, then, a night over a year ago, some muggy twilight in the heart of a Chicago August; I was in town for one night before I had my one-way to Berlin in the morning, where I was moving for work, the first good job offer I’d ever gotten. We were stepping off the El somewhere near Wrigleyville, where Memo suggested we get off and take a walk for a while. There was a wine-bottle’s worth of drunk between us, and we seemed to veer off the platform without direction. It was hot, and my shirt stuck to my chest and shoulders. Memo wore a dark blouse and a white skirt that danced against her legs every time she walked.

Memo finally pointed us towards Lake Michigan, looking down at her feet as we walked, gripping her skirt at her hips and squeezing the fabric between her fingers. “Look at this,” she said, rubbing it with her thumb and inviting me to touch. “Got it today. Guess how much.”

“Ten dollars,” I said, just looking.

“I like where your mind is,” she said, “but this is Chicago. Forty bucks. Still a great deal.”

“Okay.” I smiled.

The brownstones seemed to lean in over the street, covered in the thin membrane of orange streetlight that bounded in arcs across their fronts with every lamp. We passed a busker with an accordion squeezing out a tango by Piazzolla, with a nose that looked to have been broken three times, pivoting to face us as we walked by. We passed a deli with a green awning that we would eat at when I used to visit, still bearing the same white strip of 80’s balloon font, Sal’s, that now looked a little bit older and a little more foreign from the wear of passing time. Caked stains from rain runoff striped its sides. I stopped for a moment as Memo walked ahead and I watched her reflection disappear off the edge of the deli window in a drain of color. I’d loved her before, and always would, but I would never tell her, not then, not ever. There were the little rules of the universe, repeating themselves infinitely in quiet dramas played out in the past and present and future, at school, in the Little Village, on the waterfront where we were about to make love and then dress without speaking. A history and destiny so real and certain that its story seemed to be printed in letters of fire.

My breath shook. Beneath the lights and the motion of the city, the streets seemed to writhe and tremble with life. Ahead, there was a storefront neon whose cursive message—Open 24 hrs.—seemed to set the air around her shoulders into vibrations, and Memo paused a moment before stepping off the curb ahead.

“Hey,” I said, even as she started to turn. “Wait up.”

at the Platz der Republik

I lay in a park watching the sky.
Clouds pass in domes of grey,
mottled with the blue of summer.
Climbing away.

The things we do when in love.
How long is not long enough?
These are the things we do now.
Sitting in parks, watching the children.
I don't know you, and you don't know me.

My hands pass in front of the sun.
The sun passes the earth.
The clouds climb together
towards the atmosphere, to ignite.
I don't know you, and you don't know me.

I lay in a park watching the sky.
I lay in a park.
Climbing away.

the land of ready

I was born in the land of ready.
My father died with grey ink in his heart
holding a book called “Be Angry At The Sun.”
We wrapped the sun in lattice
and painted the door
geranium red.
Change flattened the lilacs.

Born in the land of ready and plenty,
so haven’t you heard?
Kill thy poet and vengeance is swift.
In this town the best give birth
blessed to stoke the bitter plenty.
Bobby spins his 808s
to wind Deb up for magic
and there I’ll be caught again
with cigarettes and silhouettes
keeping that shit in line,
holding pregnant light to smile
for one more run through town’s main drag,
fronting for the little magic,
with string quartets and pirouettes
hopping cold-cocked bastard motherfuckers
who stamped their feet upon
my sovereign right to anger.
And what!
I traveled space and time
to ride this Motown supernova.
It’s a chanteuse honky-tonk;
I danced in a melody made of satin
and transfigured all the tenements on my block.
Bobby spun and Debbie spun
and every year their bitter past
meets some better pavement,
and lo to all those motherfuckers
who dared tread upon it.

I was born in the land of ready,
where everywhere decent was named
after decency everywhere else;
Danny drove an old police cruiser
forty miles to the ocean,
where he blew out his brains
to Dre on cassette.
We speak of him kindly but barely speak.
John Q. Layaway. He was Army. My mother blamed
a sweet and lonesome wind.
He was not born Ready.
Abby was born ready.
But she cried and fought and finally
cussed her way to Washington,
cut by heart and better fury,
losing re-election,
fleeing by Danny-chariot
into the muddy palms of the Potomac.
And through the window,
my brother held a fist of paper flame
to his sweet and lonesome sky.

I snared the moon in a net of fingers
entombed across a dark and endless paddock.
Come see the dead,
the ditchlilies,
the ignorant rays of the sun;
this land of our fathers,
the sometimes-magnificent
blue-collar made-its with
hokeyisms fresh for all occasions.
Laugh, drink beer,
wake up for work.
So
you came back and asked
if I’d loved someone in this town.
The savage candor:
Jump from a bridge—
Isn’t the water, suddenly, there?