Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories - Rilegato

Gibbons, Reginald

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0226290581 ISBN 13: 9780226290584

Casa editrice: Univ of Chicago Pr, 2010

Riassunto

Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet’s eye, and capture what it’s really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience—a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O’Hare, and much more—these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg.

Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western Avenue, and from a child's piggybank to nature in urban spaces. For Gibbons, the city’s people, places, and historical reverberations are a compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of its most prominent writers, Slow Trains Overhead evokes and commemorates human life in a great city.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Reginald Gibbons is a poet, fiction writer, translator, and essayist. At Northwestern University, he is professor of English and classics, director of the Center for the Writing Arts, and codirector of the MA/MFA Program in Creative Writing. His most recent poetry collection, Creatures of a Day, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.

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SLOW TRAINS OVERHEAD

CHICAGO POEMS AND STORIES By REGINALD GIBBONS

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2010 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-29058-4

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................ixI Adams & Wabash.................................................................3A Meeting........................................................................6Five Pears or Peaches............................................................7Ode: Citizens....................................................................8Avian Time.......................................................................13Elsewhere Children...............................................................14A Car............................................................................17Milwaukee & Division.............................................................22Small Business...................................................................24Forsaken in the City.............................................................27A Large Heavy-Faced Woman, Pocked, Unkempt, in a Loose Dress.....................29Admiration.......................................................................31A Leap...........................................................................32II Mekong Restaurant.............................................................37City.............................................................................39Wonder...........................................................................43Ode: At a Twenty-Four-Hour Gas Station...........................................44Enough...........................................................................50The Vanishing Point..............................................................52Just Imagine.....................................................................54On Sad Suburban Afternoons of Autumn.............................................57Broadway & Argyle................................................................58Slow Motion......................................................................59Sparrow..........................................................................62An Aching Young Man..............................................................64Oh...............................................................................67Boy on a Busy Corner.............................................................68III A Man in a Suit..............................................................73Hungry Man Raids Supermarket.....................................................76The Blue Dress...................................................................78The Affect of Elms...............................................................87Red Line Howard / 95th...........................................................88Mission..........................................................................90Rich Pale Pink...................................................................91Friday Snow......................................................................93Nonna............................................................................95State & Wacker...................................................................100On Belmont.......................................................................103Christmas........................................................................104Celebration......................................................................107No Matter What Has Happened This May.............................................109

Chapter One

    ADAMS & WABASH

    Where moon light angles
        through the east-west streets,
    down among the old-
        for-America
    tall buildings that changed
        the streets of other
    cities, circulate
        elevated trains
    overhead, shrieking
        and drumming, lit by
    explosions of sparks
        that harm no one, and
    the shadowed persons
        walking underneath
    the erratic waves—
        not of the lake but
    of noise—move through fog
        sieved by the steel mesh
    of the supporting
        structures or through rain
    that rinses pavements
        and the el platforms
    or through new snow that
        quiets corners, moods,
    riveted careers.
        Working for others
    with hands, backs, machines,
        men built hard towers
    that part the high air;
        women and men built,
    cooked, cleaned, delivered,
        typed and filed, carried
    and delivered, priced
        and sold. The river
    and air were filthy.
        In a hundred years
    builders would migrate
        north a mile but in
    those modern times this
        was all the downtown
    that was. And circling
        on a round-cornered
    rectangle of tracks
        run the trains, clockwise
    and counter, veering
        through or loop-the-loop
    and out again. Why
        even try to list
    the kinds of places
        men and women made
    to make money? Not
        enough of them, yet
    too many. From slow
        trains overhead some
    passengers can still
        see stone ornaments,
    pilasters, lintels,
        carved by grandfathers,
    great uncles, and gone
        second cousins of
    today—gargoyle heads
        and curving leaves, like
    memorials for
        that which was built to
    be torn down again
        someday, for those who
    got good wages out
        of all this building
    or were broken by
        it, or both, yet whose
    labor preserves a
        record of labor,
    imagination,
        ambition, skill, greed,
    folly, courage, cost,
        error, story, so
    that a time before
        remains present within
    the dark spark-lit
        loud careening now.

A MEETING

While the unaware world is both opening and closing toward our future on this night of sparkling gusts and frozen pavements, inside a large shabby upstairs room thirty or so are gathered to honor the undaunted long-lived hero (while she thinks of her secret despair from time to time, of retreats she did not let others see, of rising again and again in the teeth of cold winds, of the campaign that is about to begin), to praise her resolve and stamina (which she has maintained thanks to her mother's love or her father's, when she was young; or despite their indifference, but because of the love, when she was young, of some teacher or aunt who opened a way for her, and whom she cannot thank now because the years have closed behind her),

and we all sit together on folding chairs arranged (by a faithful keeper of our hope, who came early) in careful rows on the cracked, scuffed, peeling linoleum floor, we listen to tributes both flowery and plain, both fluent and stammering (from the simple person who looks anxiously at the hero while speaking and from the confident, experienced operative who, having lived far more than could be told, tells some of what remains to be lived), and in the first row of chairs the hero bows her gray-haired head, and the hour is passing, and, because the old window that someone opened in order to let out the accumulated heat is letting too much cold from the brute night into the large shabby upstairs room, a woman from the back row of the folding chairs now disarranged on the cracked, scuffed, peeling linoleum floor goes to that window, and as quietly as she can, while another tribute is being offered, she draws it downward and closed (although one pane is already broken out anyway as if the hero herself, stronger than the rest of us, insisting on our behalf, had arrived secretly before any of us and deliberately shattered it).

FIVE PEARS OR PEACHES

Buckled into the cramped back seat, she sings to herself as I drive toward her school through the town streets. Straining upward to see out her window, she watches the things that go by, the ones she sees—I know only that some of them are the houses we sometimes say we wish were ours. But today as we pass them we only think it; or I do, while she's singing—the big yellow one with a roofed portico for cars never there, the pink stucco one with red shutters that's her favorite. Most of what she sings rhymes as it unwinds in the direction she goes with it. Half the way to school she sings, and then she stops, the song becomes a secret she'd rather keep to herself, the underground sweetwater stream through the tiny continent of her, on which her high oboe voice floats through forests softly, the calling of a hidden pensive bird—this is the way I strain my grasp to imagine what it's like for her to be thinking of things, to herself, to be feeling her happiness or fear.

After I leave her inside the school, which was converted from an old house in whose kitchen you can almost still smell the fruit being cooked down for canning, she waves goodbye from a window, and I can make her cover her mouth with one hand and laugh and roll her eyes at a small classmate if I cavort a little down the walk.

In some of her paintings, the sun's red and has teeth, but the houses are cheerful, and fat flying birds with almost human faces and long noses for beaks sail downward toward the earth, where her giant bright flowers overshadow like trees the people she draws.

At the end of the day, her naked delight in the bath is delight in a lake of still pleasures, a straight unhurried sailing in a good breeze, and a luxurious trust that there will always be this calm warm weather, and someone's hand to steer and steady the skiff of her. Ashore, orchards are blooming.

Before I get into bed with her mother at night, in our house, I look in on her and watch her sleeping hands come near her face to sweep away what's bothering her dreaming eyes. I ease my hand under her back and lift her from the edge of the bed to the center. I can almost catch the whole span of her shoulders in one hand—five pears or peaches, it might be, dreaming in a delicate basket—till they tip with their own live weight and slip from my grasp.

ODE: CITIZENS

In the long shadows of the Chicago mountains, I walk past a very old woman, she's tiny, pushing down the sidewalk in the other direction a grocery-store basket overfilled with her homeless possessions without price, maybe she's

She's the same age as Mother, at the very end, she looks very like Mother, with the same large, startling, intense and made-up eyes, and she stares

And stares at me with autumn clarity, and when I look back at her she is still staring, having stopped and half-turned, but I go on—instead of responding to her and asking, "Auntie?"

And asking who she is, asking whom she recognizes in me, taking that opportunity of a split second to speak to this stranger, but it passes before I have let myself feel

Fully the impulse to speak, the need to speak, I move on, the distance

The gap between us is too great and I don't want to turn around and see if she is still watching me,

Maybe she is, I feel guilty—her existence is knowable but willfully not known by people like me—yet this is not an aunt of whom I never knew, nor is it Mother herself as I never knew her,

As I needed to know her, or rather as I needed her to be,

To be knowable to me emotionally,

To be capable of knowing me,

This is an old woman I don't know who could use twenty dollars and a different life,

A different history

For herself and for everyone,

And for her realness I await no metaphor (they do come when the arteries of thought are calmly open),

This is not a moment amazingly full of a conversation that has never before been spoken, a discovery to overturn everything, finally an exchange of revelations.

* * *

From somewhere, a family, a village, a neighborhood, comes

The solitary singer, maybe with a guitar, who pauses with her burdens and sings, or the wayfaring man with a story that began somewhere else who stops under a tree and plays a dance on his violin, even if no one listens or dances,

Dances or even listens, for there is pain and there is hope—some of the pain

Produced impersonally by remote traders in policy, some of the pain produced

By an ever tighter knotting of constraints around our inward leap to escape, some of the hope

Used against those who hope, postponing their desires and displacing their attempts to choose onto clothes and stars and which streets to wander.

* * *

After a waitress brings three plates of hot food from which steam is rising delicately, a thin woman in a booth behind mine in a diner says to her two companions, "I only eat dark meat," her voice is apologetic, she wants to be helped— "Actually, I only eat the wings ...," she says,

"Really, I only eat part of the wings," she's about fifty, and the two men sitting opposite her, each with a glass of beer to wash down the grub, are in their seventies, and in a softer voice she says to the shorter one, "Can I call you Uncle Sid?"

And there seems to be a small party in the back room for a new young fireman, who will try to save the uncles who have built the diners and taverns and the aunts who have waited on the customers, and the customers, too, if they are caught inside the fiercest heat of what is burning us.

* * *

Near me in a coffee shop are two imperfect persons in their forties, perhaps from the nearby halfway house, the woman is nodding, almost entirely silent, as the man talks and talks in halfway words, a kind of disabled philosopher giving a disjointed discourse

On beauty, on his fingers, on gaining exactly one pound of body weight last week, on Israel, but as if the woman weren't there,

Does she even know him?—and she nods to him with her upper body in a kind of self-restrained homage of rocking, he's her lost brother, she hopes or fears,

Neither of them has any longer the habit of combing or brushing hair, he half-rises, he leans across the table and kisses her cheek.

* * *

Because in some village there will yet be a wedding that lasts three days,

Because sometimes the solitary singer, maybe with a guitar, pauses in her journey and sings, or the wayfaring man who knows a world somewhere else stops under a tree and plays a melancholy dance on his violin,

And after picking or threshing all day in Kosovo or Michoacán or Mississippi, singing softly together while riding in a tractor-cart, the harvesters go back tired to the small town to get a beer,

And in Illinois on the raw graded earth that will be a road the builders walk away from the monstrous machines turned off and turn on their own pickups, their radios shout,

And the late-night workers in Chicago restock the shelves or suit up in their clown costumes and begin to fry and sell hamburgers or in their pajamas they strain motionlessly over the report that is due, because there is resignation yet there can still be a plan.

* * *

The city's restless movement never ceases in the streets, everyone has things to do, and on the same streets the beggars and wanderers and the out-of-work and the thinkers and the grieving do almost nothing, and in offices people are performing or pretending or laughing at a whispered joke, they are laboring against a deadline or wasting the clock, and after a manager has surveilled the cubicles and returned to his office, their hands are still holding pens that must ultimately leave marks of anger and desire and calculation.

* * *

In a class I was teaching at a literacy center, I was talking about some sentences, some lines of a poem, some feelings, and interrupting me a tired woman of about thirty-five began to speak to me urgently, I listened, her face showed the intensity of a struggle within herself,

But what could she do, and how could I help her, she said, if from as early as she could remember, for her whole life, nobody had told her nothing?

Nothing. Her strong, somehow crooked face, her chipped tooth. Her solitary path to this moment—we all understood that she had come all this way without mother or father.

And an older woman sitting next to her put an arm around her after she had asked the unanswerable questions and together they cried softly.

Softly I said the word that I had learned was her scarred name,

Betty, I said, What you have just asked us all, this is what you know, this is what you have in yourself to tell us, to give to us, that we need.

AVIAN TIME

The collection manager of the bird specimens at the natural history museum told of often stopping, on his way to work during spring and fall, at the immense convention building—tall, long and wide—on the shore of Lake Michigan, where on the north side he would gather the bodies of the migratory birds killed by their collisions against the expanse of glass before first light.

The north side, whether in fall or in spring—a puzzle.

Are these particular birds blown off course by winds, and do they return in starlight or dimness before dawn or under dark clouds toward shore, making for the large bulk they might perceive as forest?

They have been flying along this same route for tens of thousands of years, and not yet has their thinking formulated this obstacle of the city that has appeared in the swift stroke of a hundred and fifty cycles of their migration.

    ELSEWHERE CHILDREN

    In the icy block between Madison and Monroe,
    walking slowly and unbalanced
    by the two unequal bags of layers of
    bags of apparently nothing,

    she who was once somebody's darling—
    and the somebody lost to her, years
    ago, and forgotten, maybe, along with birthdays
    and beatings and other things that were best

    forgotten—has stopped in a doorway.
    Two persons come walking by her unaware,
    a young woman who is saying, "There's something
    I need, not sure what," and a young man

    with goatee and thin dirty gloves
    who answers, "You looking for a man to protect you!"
    This woman he's been wishing for and has
    just met frowns and slows down;

    with her "I'm all right" they stop near
    the old one's shallow niche out of the wind.
    (What cold hand turned her this way? When?
    Last year? Or the year she was four

    or five, so long ago?) The young woman
    stamps her cheap sleek boots in the salty slush
    and splashes the man's wet running shoes,
    she says, "I'm hungry," and he answers, hoping

    maybe coffee will be enough for her, "My son says
    Daddy you going to eat eggs this morning?—
    I say no more, man, not no more! I heard they
    really bad for you!" And he laughs down at the shoes

    so useless to him, at the wonder of a world
    beyond his powers. The old woman squints up at him
    but the young one with him only says,
    looking off, "My little girl's seven."

    Separate parents, she and he, of elsewhere children.
    (Where did the old woman's father leave her
    one day, the start of the path here,
    if just with a way of saying no or yes?)

    My own dearborn, away from me today,
    with secrets already of puzzling
    not quite thinkable harm
    (I know, because at my slight warnings

    sometimes inside you a troubling echo
    I can't hear alarms you, you say
    "Don't tell me that or I'll worry
    about it all night and I won't be able to sleep!")—

    my only-five-years-old, with a soul
    already taught by pain to be articulate
    and beginning already to wrinkle, let no day
    or disappointment ever turn you

    toward a street as cold and hungry as this.
    Let someone show me please how to keep
    you from it if I can, if they can.
    As for wishing you always free of ordinary pain,

    like a father's or a mother's, I might
    as well wish food into dead refrigerators
    and the warmth to come out of these store windows
    into the street and do some good.

    Then the young woman and man walk away.
    And she who was once somebody's darling
    blinks them away and gone in the between-buildings light,
    they could be her children, she was once

    someone's, but she can't look after them,
    we can't look after our own.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from SLOW TRAINS OVERHEAD by REGINALD GIBBONS Copyright © 2010 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Chicago Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0226290581
• ISBN 13: 9780226290584
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 110
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile