A pad is something you can write in, as in sheets of paper bound together. It is also what you bleed on when you first start. When I grew older, a pad was someone’s house. My college roommate and I had, according to many persons who traipsed in and out of our campus apartment during our senior year, a cool pad, a “budget” pad.

i.

It rides high in its saddle.

It shifts and plummets—swoops—drifts.

It is still: stiller than a held breath, stiller than water frozen in the birdbath, stiller than the color white.

It is wing-shaped, solemn, more silent than midnight.

I met Marcus one night when I was out with my supervisor at the biker bar on the east side of town. The bar had one fluorescent stick for light and was filled with men whose tattoos looked homemade. After midnight, this was the only place open in town, and I saw the same faces in there night after night, but I hadn’t noticed Marcus before.

Little Village—La Villita, as it’s also known—is on Chicago’s southwest side, a cluster of bungalows with trimmed lawns and the occasional yearlong crèche or Virgin of Guadalupe standing just off the stoop. It’s south of the BNSF railroad tracks, north of the Chicago River, and just east of the westernmost city limits.

Don’t look back, Satchel Paige is supposed to have said, someone may be gaining on you. Don’t look back, Orpheus was advised, you may find your earlier poems better than the ones you will write tomorrow. Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom and was so shaken by the sight of the Red Sea swallowing the city that she became salt.