June 14, 2018Stone City
When he walked down the road to the bridge
eighty years ago to look closely at his subject,
I was standing next to the river watching mud
crumble from its banks. Heron were plentiful
then, as now, and the quarry belched out white
dust that caught the wind making headway
toward Chicago. We all loved Chicago.
It was a place you could sit and watch the murder
of the working classes while sipping iced beer
on Wabash Avenue. Gangsters would lay low
in the fields of Illinois and sometimes make
a lark of it, driving their black Pontiacs across
the Mississippi and down along the Wapsipinicon
to see where the chalky clouds began their story.
Everything in sight was made of stone. Churches,
barns, even outhouses. This was back when men
knew how to build the world. No one wanted
to take it apart. When bombs dropped, they called
it a war. They sent young men away on ships made
of stone to stop the bleeding with their own blood.
Soldiers wanted to get it over with and come back
home to build something or dig a hole or pay
a man in a striped tie for a house in the projects.
The little town lay down still through all of this.
Fascism, capitalism, socialism. All chewed up
and spit out through a Calvinist mouth. The Wapsi
moved tons of silt in spring time and the quarries
got deeper and deeper. Up out of the valley
you could set up your easel and paint a world
only chumps like me would want to enter.
He painted me there, standing by the bridge
and the river, the smallest smudge of ochre,
hiding in the obscurity of the canvas’s texture.
I always knew how to get out of the way.
I stayed behind, standing still as a portrait
and let others die. Let me teach you now
how to build with stone. Let me show you
how to hold your hand steady enough to paint
a corn filled landscape that ripples like the sea.
from #29 - Summer 2008