Dundas, Minnesota
Even the interstate cries out of silence, hovering under
the floodlights and puddles of gasoline burning the moon.
Someone is leaving this city forever. And someone is
driving the Sauvie Island beaches where girls walk naked
from their night-shadows anticipating more than the scars
of desire. Anticipating wind rising up through their bodies
like song. Because despite what we think, we are always
returning to an outfield in Dundas, Minnesota, where we
stand among tree-groves and rotted-out trains and watch
balls sail over the fence in the other direction. Tell me,
where do we go from here then, stranger? Lost in the wind-drift
and catalogue highways. Stilled in the brain with invisible
cities. Girls in Portland returning this hunger. Walking
the Hawthorne with wings in their hair. Even the gilded
madonnas in Brooklyn are crying for their hearts to be
opened. Sleeping in gutter-punk squats in Berlin, empty
cathedrals where nobody prays, where tourists reach
for the black hand of Jesus, sweat-stained and dulled
to a nub. Even the rats on the backstreets of Oxford.
Even the bird on the burning streets of Santorini, picking
a crust of bread. There’s a reason we only move further
from Dundas. There’s a reason we don’t see the true leaf
looking at a eucalyptus grove, a eucalyptus tree, a single leaf
hanging in the backdrop forever. Because beauty is never
as clear as the sound—the headlight, the half-light we see
in a dream. The mind wants to move in a circle, return
to the lines it remembers the best, find itself riding
a series of high short notes through the ceiling and off
in the ether. The soul says go clear. The heart says
go back to the first cry and do it again. The mind only
spins in between. A three-headed lizard. A house cat
with nothing to do but stalk yard-birds and chew
on its tail. There’s another thing too. Something
we don’t have a word for. If god were enough, we keep
saying, but it’s not. And anyone who’s seen it will tell you
there’s nothing but light and space and oblivion at the end.
Nothing but the same luck ruined by meaning. By living
too close to the words. The emptied-out backstreet.
The small white ball in the field-lights covered in flies.
The freshly mowed grasses. The visible parts of Orion.
The cricket-sounds building the dark other-side of the fence.
And in Portland, where girls walk shyly from winter.
Their imperfect habits. Move ceaselessly over the Steele Bridge,
crossing the river on bicycles, cruising the night roads, hovering
over the oil drums piled on rail-set barges below. All skin-black,
shivering rust in the glare. A reed of pure ecstasy pressed to your lips.
Returning in floodlights and black water shining and song.
