Work from my thesis

It's been a while, but I have been working. The pieces I'm posting are from my thesis, which is a project where I travel to each of the 77 "well-defined" community areas of Chicago and write a poem about the area. The community areas were defined by the University of Chicago in the 1920s and related to the neighborhoods that existed at the time. Since then, the boundaries of the community areas have not shifted, however the neighborhoods have gone through immense change, whether it be gentrification, white-flight, industrialization, blight, and so on. My poems try to capture the impossibility of place in the light of change.


None of these are done and if you compare them to my earlier work I think you'll see I'm trying out a bunch of new shit here, so be patient with me.



O’hare

Some deaths crawl and some breath
tall enough to reckon an equal violence
but a disparate imagery of grey
these words of mine unknown to you
unknowable to me a wing in the air
but not the way you might think
I know I use too many pictures of fire
when I speak but I had tickets on that flight.

(October 24, 2008)




Prophecy in Bridgeport

I awake to the noise of morning light
running down the slats in the hall
and Rachel out the window weeping
for her children ideal skies snag in the willows
up the road scenes are waiting for me
future jackets hang over the backs of future chairs
the texture of salt under soft-white GE
electrics and a dash of birch from outside the gates
so this is my aspen grove brick tied to brick tied
to sewer and all the time bound to boundaries
always without momentum reading aloud
“we are one” but we aren’t so now

Undying I drink at the shore undying I tumble
to the forefront a fervor now in the slats drunken
flood of sun ripping the ceiling to white crushing
white white white
and now undying I too sit beside her, weeping.

(November 9th, 2008)




Lake View

Signs in windows:
shocks and struts nuts on Clark for rent
maple cherry hickory ash old growth
chestnut oak pine black walnut black walls.

There is a man who cuts down houses
he speaks of the day when all forests were
virgin forests trunks heard at first new music
strange music strange intonations bounced
from limb to limb somewhere silence watched
a leaf fall but now the new deaths are not
easy deaths the gash of sky growing forever
under portent of clouds tumbling eyes ripped
out by the potential sun

westward, westward.

Old growth before old growth meant anything
then came January before January meant
anything what do we make of the human
fire that which we need that which destroys
feeds before need can ever lose meaning

listen, listen.

(November 10th, 2008)




Lincoln Square

Tall buildings were as errors in the sky
on the day we learned the name of the place
a slingshot downed a common raven voices
crisscrossed over white lace and ironed linen
tables set by granddaughters grandsons play
football in the street lined with imported trees
under streetlight curfews and fireside chats
by the warmth of the wooden radio in school
they taught us how Kepler’s laws applied
even to planets inhabited by the common raven.

(October 22nd, 2008)



Beverly

There will be the breath of prescience
and a pause before lichens become
the death of stone walls ivy choked
windows fall from skeletal steel

The smog will be done
with our rattling skyline silence rocks
the infinite and the sun will rock
our true ceilings and somewhere

A stranger now waits for news
from the wind of our demise
There will be the breath
of prescience and a pause.





Austin

To stand and refute the light
the day and the life to trace
and fail to find meaning in the day
to ask a Roman façade knowing
Corinthian flames lengths of stairs
falling knees breaking faces shuttered

To watch the news slide across
our horizon and to see the afternoon
die in a flash of night
under the sky in May
and the sky in November to wait
for the funerals and to wait for

The sky in August you’ll never
find memories of laughter
but only the memory
of long hallways when you stand
to refute the light




Lincoln Park

Under dampened white sky
low silken sidewalk of cloud

red brick running cracked hands
birthing ferrous lifeblood red-white

over and over and the sidewalks
of a glassed over river dying:

hands of Her nature saddened
by piles of strychnine steel

completing the complete
closing the cycle

but our nature knows
no end to the cycle

and strangles onward
deaf-blind, dampened