Friday With The City
-After Jim Gustafson
Robert Shields
It just sits there like an apple caught
in the mouth of a boar, its buildings
like shackled widows, a little bit cynical
a little bit ready for death.
Erie, nothing but small black thicket
that litters the fallen snow.
Erie the torn sleeve of a little
girl with cupped hands, the black shoe
that a woman removes to fix her stocking.
Erie means old people sleeping
in waiting rooms and children
playing with gun shaped hands.
It stirs in its stomach a tanned
sort of nausea, the kind that blinds
you on the freeway interchange
the kind that slams down the phone
on its dying mother.
Erie, the other colored paint
that covers graffiti,
the word furniture
on the side of a building
smeared by rain, a broom cradled
in the hands of a man
walking onto a lake
to the place where the shadow
of two women meet. It has
the taste of raw whiskey and fish
and old fools turning to piss into parades
and cloth roses that forever wrap
around its grave and plastic babies
and it just sits there, drunk
in a second hand suit
watching hallways
with its clouded
peephole eyes.
