*
No one asks how he got cigarettes at thirteen, or why he rides his bike through the tall grass when the rest of us run. To me he’s a bolt of lightning, a kindled spirit beyond question who makes some sense of the body: the nape of the neck was made for lips and a breath; touch is not its meaning; you can produce enough tears to put out a brush fire. I am nine.
*
Unreasonable soldiers mount crabapple trees, armed to the teeth with sweet ammunition. None of the guilty are caught in the crossfire, but the innocent drop like flies. There’s a unfortunate pleasure in the simple proof of power, but I’m a steel rabbit and I run. I am ten.
*
It’s just like Virginia snow to fall like that, enough to delay a flight but not cancel it. Enough to prelude a city made entirely of ice, to which after seven summers filled with diamond-eyed friends, cicadas, battles and kingdoms whose fated falling is triumphant proof to a doubting heart of their reign, strange fate transports my story.
City of Ice
The Virginia Chronicles, Part X
1. Chicago
The once-steady sun turns
Through the window of a Northwest Orient 747
Beginning its long fall into winter.
In overnight snow straight avenues reappear
Cut by light to pavement and concrete
A warren deep as my waist or even shoulders
Deep as laughter and imagination
Deep as a stolen kiss
Deep enough to hide from bullies
Enough to hold everything that runs
Free between the snows.
2. Virginia
Fresh blacktop smelled like
Fresh-cooked dinosaurs
In the long summer heat
At T.J. Elementary
The repaving replaced Jurassic
Crevasses and mystery bumps
With bright white boxes
Full of hopscotch
And empty mystery grids
So we played in the dirt
Where clumps of lava rock played
And shy salamanders played
And the giggling creek played
We were the Earth’s children
And we played where it plays.
The book on my knees, “Chicago in Pictures”
A vehicle of anticipation
I saw snow, tall as a ten year old
Frosting the world with delectable snow days
– surely kids in Chicago
hardly ever have school!
But I also saw lightning, striking
Great wide-eyed towers
Lightning sharper than I’d seen.
The Diamond Kingdom has fallen
Its borders overspilled by barbarians
And head hunters
The castle bridge is shut
In defense of nothing
The cicada branches
And the grass fields mute.
As good-bye days inevitably lingered
Between me and endless snow days
I was transported, wrapped in a surreality
A self-orbiting planet with my own atmosphere
And only the assumed warmth of a sun.
3. Chicago
Monsters are domestic
They prop our skin
With boney outlines
And can’t be outrun, for
They’re in, they’re the engine
Of our breath as we run
Stealing our wind
For their own bright skin.
II.
Selected Poems
Things that Fall
I was Ganymede
Released to gravity
And why not
Things that fall
And I fell
Come from somewhere high
And sometimes
To their own surprise
They learn to fly
Forty Breaths
In, out
thirty-nine
my breath pumps flakes
within a snow globe
I blizzard
The Big Apple
thirty-four
flared nostrils
conjure a petting zoo
from thin air
and a lamb’s stare
twenty-eight
I bounce upon a
methodical pony
under a careful hand
that never loses the bridle
just twenty yet
Curious waves
the color of sand
inspect me with briny
jellyfish kisses
fourteen,
and the fixed sun smiles
ten
through a 747 window
nine
into an unnatural scene
eight
a woman's sympathy yields peanuts
seven
and soda(!)
six
the pillow scratches and
five
there are no covers
four
up here in the sky
three
but the sun stands firm
two
and sleep costs
one
just forty breaths
Suburban Sidewalk Games
Flash boys
play virtual men
luminous
promontory
men
dazzling and
equally popular
on or in court
these are character
-driven stories.
Flash boys
on suburban sidewalks
in bedrooms
boardrooms and
barrooms
especially dazzling
in liquid displays
play
boys playing men
absent models, roles
absent roles, each other
beating each other
to the same punch
line.
It's a flash flood
up to our eyes
mobs of
luminous
unbreakable
boys
while real men
aren’t so shiny
are gentle enough to break
and behind your back
not right in front
of our eyes.
Promontory men
unbreakable boys
play
black or white
straight or gay
rich or poor
all borne the same
by the same waters
in the same basin
they rise
like ashes
marking the tide.
Fortifications
our boundaries are permeable
each draught flies through
we leak self like nets water
selflessly trawling an open sea
so we like things like walls,
like corners, like having our backs
against or being backed into them
they defend at least one front, or two
Near 82 Boulevard de Clichy
Paris in July
Local juilletistes leave the keys
To tourists chasing a hot bargain.
1993, at twenty, with my mother.
On one hard-won afternoon alone
I took the Metro -- not to the Orsay,
Or the Invalides or the Louvre,
But to the place they call Pigalle
In the four-winged shadow of
The Bal du Moulin Rouge.
Wanting to see for myself in living color
I walked the footsteps of Picasso,
Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh.
I was sure the same dirt their boots
Perturbed still stuck smugly
To the stones of Pig Alley.
There I learned to respect the business
Acumen of Roma children,
That I didn’t know
French well enough
To bargain,
And why it paid the locals
Of that porcine district
To July in Pigalle, and not abroad:
As chardonnay sweats in St. Germain
Dollars swarm the alley like flies on
Twenty-year-old American boys,
Who brush them away
Without thinking.
The Virginia Chronicles Page 2
