Crosstown Two after Low Spirit Snowfall: Fire and Coal Vision
In flames, deep crimson swirled
in sunset orange,
half-face rises,
deep charcoal,
sandstone smooth
Mesingw arrives
in the space between
daughters and ancestors,
grandfather of the west,
grandmother moon.
Rise,
as in the drift of planets,
crawl of glaciers.
Waiting for buses, moving on the time set by the city itself, I find myself in fresh light of a sweet deer exhaled day in the grip of dreams. Revisits with the under-recalled and haunting images, voices, the smells and tastes that know no body but the one I imagine myself to be. Creation moves in near negligible understated bursts in the pockets left between passing cars, the forked tongues of SUV exhaust pipes. Our waking selves stalk the outlines of our lives in the manner that we dream them.
Pigeons above
the soccer store
startled
but do not move
from window ledges.
Storekeeper locks up
crosses street to diner.
The light, the fire that burns at the heart of creation, is felt most robustly in the darkest months. Back-alley, pallet-fed, wood-stove heat in the middle of window-rattling snowfall. Fast, dirty, the dryness telling of the nature of that consumed in flames. Yet, all heat is embracing. All heat a shadow of the umbilical cord tracing our path back towards mother earth. In wait, taunted by the cold world around me, from salted horizon to shovel-scraped horizon, the honest search is for that heat. That light breaks through a shifting wall of cloud above Ford City.
Awake. Opalaine adorned
cup in hand. Waiting above
concrete bus bench. Old snow
crunches beneath boot toe.
Our warmth above, our earth
still rising from the weight of ice.
Rubber floor boards running rivulets of grit snow melt and salt seams run three days deep. Bus accelerates like Saavik punching the Enterprise from dry dock. Mast sets full and the in-between smells not of human presence but cooked metals on a radiator left open too long by a closed window. From here, the city lurches by in the wide cataract haze of road-salted saline mist. From here, one feels the city, understands the motions and smells and songs not given in the seclusions provided by automatic five speeds, Dolby surround sound, and warmed seat drip lines of another person’s work and extended credit. Let creation fill your senses. Understand that this world is, too, filled with the movement of others. Our world stretches beyond turn-key warmth, wide-open parking lots.
To the sky, just below cross-river
skyscrapers, this town with a royal
city name stretches upward.
Rises as it can, with broad parking
lots, empty, anchoring the stretch.
Discarded Tim Horton’s bag
does cartwheels before
the shuffle of a homeless
woman. Downward
she stares, cracked asphalt
the world her vision plays in.
Bus hesitates outside former bank turned payday loan dispensary. Hope comes in five-thousand-dollar daily advances with thirty-two percent interest compounded hourly. An empty lobby overlooking plexiglass wrapped counters greets a woman and three children as they push inside from the cold. Seven hurried beeps and the falling of pocket change, this bus pulls off into the melee of traffic cutting past ground-in-dirt buildings, tinted storefronts that reflect back cracked windows, busted sidewalks, garbage strewn planters, the type of city we grew to fear in our cross-border cousins.
Full to standing, mumbles
and full-throated replies
arrive in Arabic, Mandarin,
westside swagger, crosstown
sews triptych of five inner-city
kilometers together.
Along this main artery, many cities become one, the bus a bob and weave of stops and arrivals, goings and departures. Past vacant single-story restaurant fronts, railroad underpasses, and shuttered schools, interiors left to electrified heat and recrystallizing salt, we are left with the rise and fall of an engine between stops. The quiet entry into the old town site divided by private bridge and the denuded plots of one-time brick-faced homes. Heat rising through unseen vents cooks the black, salt-stained floor. This three-passenger bus climbs Mill Street and I exit, before the next westward swing.
Down hill, past the rise
where three dead men
hanged and disappeared
in a white-horse night
to last mill on a river
once dominated by them
still churned by wind,
here at river coast, even
the bridge, even other
shore factories subservient
to the wind that cuts
into stored transit heat.
Grass twitches above a froze-out inlet. I stop at an oil drum turned campfire, abandoned in the rising day, and the dying heat of this rust-sided drum pours silent into vacant shoreline parkland. Believe that our ancestors fled to this point from bad peace-treaty surrendered homes to land hungry tax evaders. Believe that our ancestors fled to this point from men hungry enough to turn humanity into property rights. In the shuffle of wind-whipped grass, the groan of nearby mill paddles, and the motion of wind gusts against snowdrifts, understand you hear the song left us by millennia of creation.
At tree line,
witness
white tails,
four of them,
saunter inland.
Second to last, lingers
as if a weight upon its back,
the smell of cooling coals
creeping in,
shoreline vision
searches for hints
of black and red,
in failing warmth,
scans
the space between
daughters and ancestors,
grandfather of the west,
grandmother moon.
