WINTER 2014 SVPPLEMENT

Two Poems

HOW TO HAUNT THE BANK-OWNED HOMES OF DEARBORN, MI [tab15]“The hero at death is a seed dropped back into the furrow[/tab15] [tab15]he himself carved, splendor buried in the sillion. We are the fruit[/tab15] [tab15]of that seed, or we can be, if we seek the name of our own roots.”[/tab15]                                                             [tab15]—Dan Beachy-Quick[/tab15] This interiority turned up like a collar, an aversion to sunlight dots the park with parasols bright as infant pupils. The white around the eye should not be white but ought to resemble a skein of fat, the toughened consequence of vision. There are days muck-brown and stagnant when the mind feigns work but recoils at the little veins in the river’s mirror tributizing toxins.

 

You must visit the creek that palms the reflection and chisels eyes from furrows of Tedrow loam.

Sight is ancient; Its history looks through us and registers well-meaning-looking features like weak messianic forces.

This thing looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us.

Tired fishers pull carp over metal railings, and seagulls peck garbage and bones from the asphalt at Fish Hatchery Park. The Rouge River is a black Lincoln’s hood.

This river doesn’t flow. It sits in its stink. What happened to Edsel Ford in 1943?

Edsel’s stomach burned
 a little at first, then excruciatingly, until one morning
 he saw grey broodcombs in his cherry wood table and blacked out.
 Any morsel, even water, sent pangs 
along the eroded wall. The old man fed him unpasteurized milk to treat his “undulant fever”

(Once you said Edsel Ford really died of cirrhosis; he hated his father, he loved booze and horses, but he made damn sure those airplanes rolled off of the line way out here in Ypsi where blue angels do tricks in the sky).

Pace-setters dangled gloves at their sides in silence at the hour of his funeral. An emaciated man with a birdlike face cursed flashbulbs and reporters as he stepped from the dim of the cathedral into the bright afternoon like a photograph of his second, less heroic self.

We found slender winter stoneflies in Johnson Creek and took it for an omen.

In Greenfield Village glass is blown into ornamental shapes. As my eyes and body ache into the glare of water, an anachronistic mill wheel slops the sheen from rivulets. Jim Sullivan wakens yelling, “Strike. Strike.” Walter Reuther lies on the trestle bridge at Miller Road, a bandage wrapped around his head.

You must find our grandmother. She still lives inside that house on Shenandoah Street, laying down cards in an ongoing game of solitaire, drinking vodka from a coffee cup labelled, “Justice.” Her face wrinkled like a wet paper bag, her chalky tongue rolling under smoke, her breath of alcohol and sand, and ask her where the river goes. To another river? To the big lake eventually?

She shapes eyes out of fluviatile loam. She says we must squat in bank-owned homes. She says one must enter history like flotsam. The night Henry Ford died the Rouge River flooded after days of rain. It knocked out power to his mansion. A single candle and a wood fire at his death bed, two final innovations.

The bank’s eyes are clean, their pupils in the black. The weight of the sheriff leans against the door loosening the latch.

Her smoke furls around the body of the city. The lamp’s shadow on the ceiling yellow as her eye.

Eyes and body ache into the glare of water.

The bungalows are boarded up and padlocked one by one.   HOW TO EXTIRPATE MUNICIPAL DEBT Milkweed woven into chain link, The signs of erstwhile gangs magisculed Over tennis courts and brick. A crude cash emblem, A diadem on a star. Pheasants in the poverty grass and poverty’s Antecedents gritting teeth. A threnody of un-spayed cats. Apple cores, zero cores, Emptiness cores, honey locust hanging Over the garage in the rain That falls yellow and reticular As an old drunk’s face. I am no longer dreaming of what Will come. I pick huckleberries like a sparrow; I strip the nails From broken stairs. The fighting dogs are bleeding; The soporific buses along the avenue hum. Leave any noun to the elements And it gets cored to its basest denotation. Burnt rodent skull Inside the pizza box, Blue tarp over shingle-rot, Mossed and scabrous, saplings Growing in the gutter, The street lights dark throughout the night like, Fuck you. Nobody’s Going to pay this down.