“My Favorite Things” Live in Belgium, ‘65

Down along the Flint River in Michigan,
at the factory they proudly called Chevy-in-the-hole,
the chain-link fences around the cracked
concrete and weeds lean like slave ships under sail.

The shackles in the old stockade on Gorée Island, Senegal,
seem very far away from here,
land of pie-chart smiles,
bar-graph skylines, the numbers all in a row:

block-after-block of abandoned homes,
plywood drill-gunned over dreamless doors,
where the shadows the spreadsheets tried to imprison
riot like suffocated air in the hollow handles of Paul Revere's tea pots.

Such silence is an appendix about to burst:
claws of the bodice, waistcoats of gentlemen gorged
on red meat in sitting rooms, the well-oiled chains
of grandfather clock weights sinking slowly as no one speaks.

The piano-forte's steel strings cannot cut
the mute air, heavy as an oil portrait,
or an anchor, the corroded, barbed grin hanging
from a drowned crossbar.

(Reprinted with permission of Qua Magazine, winter 2015)