minneapolis / punks / fiftieth street / laughing water / want / iowa / overnight / flare / winter warmth / you / that teenage feeling / huddle / windchill / chicago / ragged company / the new year / january / dawn / pulse / on the mall / compassion, simplicity, and patience / lilac / saturday / like thread / to your thawing ribcage / bubbling spring / just a thought / i ain't even kissed you yet / 407 cedar ave. s. / biking over the bridge / boy eats world / altocumulus undulatus / duluth / north country cabin / spring hope, nc / little / rocketcar / ballad with clouds / king of summertime
City of cold ribcages,
city of shredded clouds and scattered winds,
I know your frozen bullet wounds,
city of buttoned coats,
frost on the scarf, burning breaths,
I know your weeping lakes and laughing creeks,
city of pitching waves, rippling avenues,
seagulls and no sea,
I know your leaves like ash, lakes like May potholes,
I know your shivering refugees,
Hobo mittens, waffle skivvies and rag woolslush,
I know your whole-wheat dynamite,
I know your parkways, boulevards, avenues,
alleyways, paths and portages,
city I need to leave to love,
I know your real name!
City of shacks, wood-burning stoves, holes in the ice,
empty beer cans,
the halfway parallel marked with twine
wound ‘round a twig beside an old farm road,
I know the red and gold, the dead petals,
I know the covered gardens braced,
city like a mandolin pluck,
city licked clean in March, healed by April,
by December the stitched reopened after a long, sore Autumn
city of thronging cemeteries filled with old loves
and first kisses and summer thighs,
I know the war heroes and the poets, now alphabet streets
city of flung flashes, I remember my
city, Minneapolis, Minneapolis,
I chant ecstatic.
The jangle of
chains
and clips dangling
from back pockets
and belt loops—
this
brings me home.
The fog curls,
grasps treebranches, people and
headlights, lampposts and glass,
and the long road
I’m driving
is flooded with the
damp smell of a yellow
September night.
The girl sitting beside
me in the truck cab
sings in the dark
to me it sounds like French,
so soft and foreign,
the rattle from the bed slows to a hum
at the light, and she becomes
a voice from a
turned-down radio,
threadbare and imprecise,
as if coming from the fog.
She does this unconsciously, this singing,
across the bench seat, the melody older than us
and the words invented right here,
and this is how I know I love her.
Remember.
At the end of a book the pages without words.
The ivy climbing the walls that you ripped down one summer.
Remember what the streetlights used to mean.
The laughing water and her noble prince.
The vibrating overtone of the last piano shudder,
the ring of panoramic epiphany.
Remember the half-second hiss of the radio after it’s turned off.
Remember the rock and roll ghost.
Remember?
Her face on a retreating bicycle, and the wheatfields.
Remember when your fingers cried.
Remember before it all forgets you.
I want to feel anything,
other than this
I want the wind to sting my eyes
I want the snow to bite my back,
ruddy my skin, pull at my ears,
freeze my morning-wet hair
I want the wind to blow
the leaves off the street, the smoke
out of my chimney, my fire out,
the scarf off my neck
I want the grass to untie my shoes and
stain my tripped knees, not soften my fall,
fill my nose until bleeding
I want the dirt on my fingers and elbows
I want the sun to laugh at my cheeks
red and numb
I want the pine needles as a bed in the cold
I want the moon to sleep with me in the clovers
I want the leaves to cut my feet
through the soles of my shoes
that way I’d just know they cared.
I want the rain in July, I want the August heat
I want the September sun to lie and tell me it’s warm
I want the October snow to laugh when I fall.
We watch quietly,
with the reverence
of prayer
The fireflies come cometing
as we slip through the indigo Iowa twilight,
we watch them dance over the soybeans and corn.
Maybe this is a prayer, and
maybe this is god, the Iowa twilight,
right here,
glowing,
floating with
complete serenity
as we speed by.
for LP
Clouds settle in around the skyscrapers
snow will finally hit the dry winter.
Minneapolis falls asleep.
Steel and glass evaporate
away into the night.
In the hours before dawn
the clouds
will drop snow across the city,
steel and glass condensing,
over each person, car,
house, street,
and back
into the frames of the skyscrapers,
which will be reformed with the morning.
The highway arcs away from downtown,
high over the black Mississippi,
frozen on the edges.
Burlington Northern and Soo Line trains cross down below,
headed for the riverside silos, or
Chicago and the East, or the Dakotas and
everything West.
The bridges are silent.
The skies looming, stained by the towers of frameless light, are silent.
The homes below are silent.
Everything in anticipation
of the wicked and beautiful force to come with this,
the season’s first snowfall.
And it’s beginning to snow.
Fat pillowfight feathers in vertical ballet
onto the hair and shoulders
and hats and mittens
of quiet witnesses.
Through the streetlamps I see
each flake flare
as it falls
to the earth.
It started with the frost
that killed the flowers.
You took me upstairs
with your warm hand.
The stairway
with the smell of sugar cookies,
with the boot-puddles.
Fooling around in a room with flecking gold wallpaper
on the bare mattress—
there’s your chest of drawers,
filled with wool sweaters and longjohns,
soft old pairs of cotton underwear.
Your windows catching snow in the
corners and piling up quick.
I’m not really sleeping, head on your chest.
head on your heart. How could I sleep?
How could I sleep?
Your radiator’s on, blasting and the valve stuck.
How could I sleep?
Move closer, curl up.
Watch as we get snowed in.
I hope we don’t escape ‘til spring.
The snow makes me hurt
with every feeling I’ve ever had.
You are
a holiday party,
a light that flickers but stays on
a doorframe wrapped in bulbs
you are
a green clothbound
book, slim, with two dog-eared
pages: you are a sleek horse
in a field near Rochester; you
are a wild swan at Coole
you are
a book-length poem wrapped in petite jeans
a taped-up box to carry all my clothes
home for the winter
you are
a grey photocopied picture traveling
by wallet in a back pocket,
a dust jacket gone missing.
I want to be there when you
explode, melting all the Minneapolitan
snow in one red star-flung flash.
I used to sneak
back in late at
night shivering violently from the cold;
I would sit in the basement stairwell,
near the bright
and burning furnace,
and I would think again about the girl I
just left, how her thighs felt,
how she looked while asleep.
I would sit there
with the gloves
still on my hands, the near-faint of reverie,
ears burning and rosy,
and after
I was done thinking I would
just listen...
listen to the
sounds of the vents
shifting, of the waterpipes freezing,
of the wooden
frame of the house
groaning as it contracts, expands, contracts
expands.
we huddle together for warmth,
warmth, we huddle together,
we love to make ourselves warm -
we love winter for the warmth it allows us
we love winter for the warmth it gives us
It’s amazing
that we can forget
the existence of
our own skin,
since it is
with us always,
as a simple medium
for pain and pleasure,
a place for nerves
to end
and sensation
to begin.
But it takes a
cold night,
when vapors become
visible and the stars seem
razor sharp, when the bank
sign flashes a double digit
negative,
to really feel your skin,
to understand
that it can feel its
own pain and pleasure like any
heart or brain,
to remember how
it guards you,
and that even the strongest,
most resolved defense
can only keep up
for so long.
You are bayonets
beneath fog gleaming
with a distant ache,
to pierce through into Heaven
Your expressways
teem with impressions of life,
the hum and click of fast traffic on asphalt
sailing headlight taillight wisps
As we lean closer
to you, Chicago
you glow with city-orange snowsky
and your ache becomes new, near
I can see that you breathe and whistle and groan
and shiver like us
Chicago you’re
flannelled and fleeced
you’re late buying presents
You’re scarves
and mittens
you’re whipping tassels and poms
you’re wool hats removed and steaming hair
Your lungs exhale
sweet mist through the gutters
to the streets
it cycles through us and reemerges
on our windblown breaths,
and then up to the clouds…
Your ache is us; your ache is ours.
We are glass and steel and swinging lightstrings;
The snow sparks when it passes beneath our streetlamps.
We’re a
lakeshore near and far, boardwalks and promenades,
we’re slipping ice-skaters,
we’re comicbook alleyways dark and cluttered;
Chicago how many old cities are buried below us?
We’re in
the lobby, listening to the lonely symphony
we’re like ghosts, Chicago, bright homesick ghosts
fogged searchlights of ghosts,
taking shape under the nation’s breath
Chicago you’re just as Sandburg said you’d be.
Thank you, Chicago,
your wind hurts my cheeks.
Thank you for this frostbitten reminder.
Before I go,
I’d like to tell you all the secrets
I thought would die with me.
Listen:
This was a long time ago;
this was not that long ago.
The sweet and stinging
sparks of history, little rebellions
begun in smoky basements
and cold streetcorners
and trashy apartments.
This is how things begin and end,
sometimes the two at once.
The years
of parties and punk shows,
pool games,
nights standing
on the France Ave concrete,
the streetlights hanging halos around our heads,
late-night dinners at Perkins.
Cigarette smoke rolling around in the air
like incense at church.
Empty bottles of red wine and Grain Belt,
and miniskirted milky thighs
beneath oak tables.
We turn to stare at the girl with
the long blue hair stuck to her sweaty neck.
At winter concerts, after everything ends,
we walk outside still in short sleeves, our hair
freezes and sweat chills our skin.
I watch people as they exit, laughing, talking, bruised,
watch steam rise off their arms and shoulders.
We stab these nights,
stab them straight in the heart,
and we drink up.
I remember the apartments on LaSalle, the parties there,
the cold-ass winter nights, the Decembers devoid,
the quiet Januaries, we all danced inside,
and all you could hear from the streets were the
muffled shouts, the thudding, the stomping.
These halfway grown-up punks, these
bad sons and daughters.
Pete kisses Lottie on each eye.
Pete has his hands down Lottie’s pants.
He calls her Ramona, but he’s not Dylan.
Neal and Walt with sawdust beards,
Neal and Walt with Elmer’s-glue mohawks,
Maddy laughs and Matt exhales,
black t-shirts with Iron Maiden album art,
stinking like tobacco and hair gel and pot,
blue hair, pink hair, spikestabbed skin,
thumb-holes in hooded sweatshirts,
crooked teeth,
thriftstore shirts and Elvis Costello glasses,
bottles break in the kitchen—
punk balladeers and jukebox fuckups
singing, shouting songs we all know by heart.
Shitty two-chord sutras, sermons in feedback.
The Op Ivy plays:
Sound system gonna bring me back yeah
one thing that I can depend on
Sweet Valentine, the gal of my dreams,
asleep against the wall.
The cute pink-haired punk girls dance,
shambling feet on hardwood.
In the pauses between songs
I can hear everyone breathing—
the tense intakes, the pants between kisses,
the calm stoned sighs, the passed-out snores,
condensation, evaporation;
breathing each other in and out.
What is this thing we’re clinging to?
What have we started? What ends tonight?
———
I hear someone singing the Rolling Stones.
When you’re sitting there in your silk upholstered chair
talking with those rich folks that you know…
I hope you don’t see me in my ragged company
’cause you know I could never stand to be alone.
———
The Minnehaha Creek has stopped flooding in the summer.
New towers stab the sky. Old neighbors move away.
Friends are married, children born.
I remember when Zooey used to make cricket noises
during the quiet times in physics class. She killed himself last December.
The tagged-up broke-down Soo Line
freightcars roll past the river to the
broke-down grain-silo stations.
It’s funny, I wonder through the years how I
could’ve ever been dragged away from this. This is me.
I’ve been gone awhile and come back, I’m
invited to the parties once again, and I’m struck
with the sickening feeling that maybe I had just
passed out for awhile, only to wake up right here,
in the apartment on LaSalle, in this wool blanket I
wrapped around myself as I fell asleep.
As I walk into the hallway the scene is just the same.
Walt and Pete hum a song you almost, almost, almost remember.
But I’ve forgotten all the words to all the songs I loved,
that once made me me.
And yet, and yet—I have to smile.
Look at them.
They’re all still in love.
They’re all still in love with each other so, so much.
Because it’s January, because the radiator’s busted,
because I’m bruised and sad,
because who else is there for me now—
I grab a beer, and I try to remember the old songs.
The space heater’s gentle rumble,
that’s one I know.
Chuck Taylors shuffle across the floor,
and that’s another. It’s a start.