Nine Chicago Poems

To Reg 1season opener The ants are licking open the peonies unwrapping the seal to the tight globes of bloom    they gang up on and chase away a ladybug I can sit here    on the porch stoop as on the step    of an amphitheater and watch    ours is a great sports city the tour guides say   even the house roofs are bleachers    some ball is always in the air ready to open    its colors fragrance like stadium food scent reaches the street    our mouths drop open    tongues about to do the work 2 The wind is so high, the lake surface contracts in a gasp The waves jump straight up. Our side must be winning. I can't hear the crowd of whitecap I see from the bus run The joggers and cyclists look as though hysterically they carry, themselves,     the news and breaking sound        that maybe There's not another side to water        nor to the whole of what we play We field against a fog, or, the home game in solids, ice in a change of uniform We contend against what is and is ourselves        though We want a side that isn't ours to have of the universe    to have us on our feet like the waves cheering on this morning this morning We want our messengers to lie    a pool of good news dead silent at our feet for us to walk open.    Our winnings winning or not: still won a life that lets us live it the excitement    of winged ankles, seas of dancing streets in the envelope. 3 When the waves jumped straight up, the messenger Sand smashed them to pieces for winning When the surface fainted back, the stampeding Sky sank its foot in that face to leave winning There were two countless words for the score You hear the roar of silence over winning Someone screaming, What are you doing, what are you Doing    Something answers, I am winning. Doing nothing is thrown out the window To eliminate that way to deal with winning We burned gridlocked cars in Morse code before We took off running to say living is winning Lake Shore Drive reads Chicago is 'living life city' (quoting the song)          winning. 4 The whole street     ladies lay afloat in the gondola stroll     of their own legs the daylit lanterns of their dreams hide inexpressibly their faces made up with not being in Kansas they fan with maps like feathers of brightly colored directions to famous brands of which this street is that one direction.     And all one direction only—         no movement. as if, since people move, there are no people on this street; the stalks of the buildings, reeds a hem of the lake sweeps through. 5 daylight you see people's reflections off each other fill the street cascading one from another the crowd slips like a fan out of itself, in the angling of store displays the glass facets kaleidoscope a rose window back of themselves full of the flash petals of grace that fall by evening home, when the ones dressed in evening wear        possession-less and so, without reflection here        take all the empties back all the want and people scavenged back off the streets     into these who dine with starving    off the streets 6 The street in the opening between buildings is running a strip of the el like a frame by frame tape, the windows of the train different shots of the sky, then it breaks, and the clouds are caught up in the walls of nearby glass-skin architecture. I never get to see what I think would be the whole movie. I, too, move on. The turns in the drive roll the buildings out from behind one another in a scenery change, only I am the one on wheels, the drop backs a larger stage than this town. And just as I can see betrayal coming by the music, my eyes braille the thunder hidden even up the sleeve of a silent film. The hand shakes anyway. Not meant to be the end of things. An inbound train toward the loop will be arriving shortly. The street in the opening 7 The John Hancock Building has never struck the actual oil it looks like it should. Wildcatters call this a dry hole. But it isn't, it has the pool of Lake Michigan on the bottom when you're looking from the top What an amazing hole, he said. Enchantment's name to call into      what we all are looking for, a spell to an opening as deep     into seeing. He had the gift of new    first time in a city, pick pockets hadn't sighted yet the eyes, the bulging wealth of openness, the shiny change. We were watching the old movie of our century. —our village root, the well's drawn-words drip into volumes in our pack trying to solve our plot. A close-up on the winch-rope, frayed by so continuously raising the question, cuts off    not to mislead the viewer; and screened on our bodies, the billboard buses, city wall— the crude that is this day struck from our drilling 8 All over everything    the sun rises funny. I heard the eagle flies on Friday as the eagle shits on Friday where I lived. Not enough for any growth to get paid its flowers. Mostly weed. Bouquet of distraction. Broken glass season gives way to plastic in the lots, only the packaging changes, it snows something or other year round white to deal with, powder or rock. Or through the window, the country unable to stop opening its poverties, making the sun go 'round to the back. But the sun reserves its someday someday to shine where door don' 'llow light. And I am drenched by a slow, barely brought in gusher of my working through the cracks, a gold opened in myself like a vein through blinding pain, through the names of need and silence. But my someday come seems didn't when the hit is only mine, not also enough of  to my brothers. 9 Dawn burnished wave,        smoothed free of everything but the slowest curve barely less than earth's hump      unloads a surf-less silence we can see— clear bright yet shimmering—stillness as. Stillness as a dangerous surface enough! a floor walked all night clear to the end of nowhere                     got to get my hands on some no place          except where money from somewhere to get me over this hump an arm swipes everything off the table to this floor        the hit bottom come to the surface on the table