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So Long, Chicago


Errol Miller



A cool day in a hot town, like
I poured myself breakfast and lunch and tried
to understand my complicated rage: my lovely friends,
they pretended long and hard and found.
I could not stay. They found me suffocating
in the dark, in the deep imperial grieving of Sasha
who comforted me. Her dreamsongs, too,
were filled with lonesome rage, absurd silent
applause for weird sisters who fumbled the ball
and created vivid domestic scenes
of bonewhite cups and saucers
falling off the edge of Midwest Earth.

Mary (Sasha) and I, we never discussed
Delmore Swartz, the wind hardly blew and rain
was not to last. I gave my love my heart again,
I was not the usual witty hero dreaming of
exquisite poetic language, just a common man
from the outskirts of Dixie remembering the joy
we had shared since 187. Suppose my work
was catalogued in many fine directories
and I had not love? Suppose Henry
my father found conflict in Birmingham.
Suppose it all comes back to
the giver of the gift.

Poor Henry, gone from Earth. Poor other husbands,
dealing with their wives. Soon we too shall be strapped
into a gulping Delta airship striving for reality,
for Atlantis and the western reaches of the Southland.
We have ruthless new wolds to take with us,
battered bags and helter-skelter poetry
written on blue handouts: the river's revenge,
a great flood cometh with surrealistic implications.
It is not business as usual. When we land
we'll thank God and gallop through the gates.
Off the coast of Leucadia, the sea, too,_ is blue,
and there are bright endless afternoons in maritime castles.
I love the ocean, and parts of Chicago, and Sasha.
I say even among families love is complex.
While Henry rests, I drink another Mexican beer
in keeping with my longing for stucco colonnades.
This day we have suffered and prepared
for our last supper in Chicago, pilgrims, I think,
in a Northern bastion falling to Confederate brigades.
No one can rewrite history, the Good Book says.
Words once spoken cannot be undone,
and the complex net of family ties drags
on and on, piercing the heart of my Valentine
in the altered state of swine gorging themselves
on homegrown corn and company
from the South.



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