Edgewood Elementary Spring Review

Richard Bryant played The Boy with me
in the role of The Father
inspired casting in the months following

The March On Washington
For Jobs And Freedom  
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing

I recall Mr. Conti’s stage direction:
remain silent for one full minute before speaking.
Richard at my feet, flour in my hair.

Richard who lived
north of the plastics factory
in the colored trace cast

as an inquisitive child
to my detached adult
asked questions like

Why is the sky blue?
Which came first
the chicken or the egg?

My character puffed
on a prop pipe, hid behind
The Detroit Free Press, replied

I don’t know son again and again
conveying laconic vacuity
through clenched teeth.

I recall laughter when Richard
telegraphed my punchline
Son, how are you going to learn anything if you don’t …

Perhaps Mr. Conti
would have revised the script
had he any inkling of the uprising

that would consume the city
in three short years or written
new dialogue fifty-five years later:

A grave father explaining
survival to his wide eyed son
in an enlightened age.

Still Life With Apples

Cezanne would ignore the grain
omit the quarter moon flute
burned quarter inch deep
pay scant attention
to your recollection  
of the barn in Armada
rinsed to a rumor of red
listen politely as you paint
a picture of the man who ran
the orphanage for bedsteads
wardrobes and sideboards
steal glances at his watch
while you play both parts
retelling the horse trade
eyebrows frantic to escape
gravity
your own straining
to lift off and boomerang
around the circumference of the table
lighting on the ordinal
points of countless dinners
apples
in the mind’s eye of the artist
flocking like birds
defying gravity
on the dizzy oval of oak.

Chicago Common Brick

The Great Fire
ancient history by the time
we take our morning stroll out
Belmont Avenue to Lake Shore Drive
skirting pandemonium’s
high water mark where wails
from Randolph Street Bridge
would have rang thin as rhyme
on wax cylinder
City of the Big Shoulders
rebuilt to resist fire, lure you away
with its siren song, careless lyrics
I yearn to rewrite and sing to you
as we cross Halstead oblivious  
to Chicago common brick
prairie dun and durable
second story turrets
biding time until streetlights
render them details in a Hopper painting.

Blank

Father was a quarryman, hands at home
On a welded wheel, fingers stiff waiting on sun
To clear the lip of the pit, an artist is his own right

Content to read the grain through an emery palm
Leave the rest to rain and wind.  Mother on the other
Hand was a chiseler with a syncopated mallet

No stranger to fluter and veiner, fine dust felting
Her coffee, laboring late, ankle deep in drifting flake
Humming as she whittled to the quick.  

One morning, seeing my chance, right hand freed
In the wee, wee hours, I hacked out feet and a face
Only a mother could love, raking footprints clean as I left.

Birds of Prey

All the information I need
just flew by the window
where I sit gazing at brachial trees
bare against China blue sky
Arvy’s sycamore buttered
thick with morning sun
sparrows ducking in and out
of the attic next door under
the baleful eye of the dog
lazing on the rug beside me
oblivious to a mating
pair of hawks at ten o’clock
hard at it while I while
morning away feeling
a little bit guilty
about my lack of talons
but then again a hapless sparrow
caught out
is a nasty bit of business
worth avoiding for someone
so ill suited to the work
of birds of prey.

Meeting Your Plane

The night nurse plane that ferried you home
Pulled covers of high desert blue over
The unmade bed of the day, careless meringue
In the rearview mirror, sanctification ahead
Drifting in the back pew of the cellphone lot
Dancing embers of arrivals and departures
From some distant bonfire where we huddle
Beneath a harvest moon, stars and planets
Skating holding patterns on a black ice pond.

Drawing 101

I wonder if I hung
onto that self-portrait from
my first college art class

peering into a mirror
contour line in pencil
student grade sketch bond.  

Dave Barr
would have to be what
in his seventies by now?

my first acquaintance
with a practicing artist
one with a studio and ideas

that woke him up early.
The twist I recall was
to render one’s face

forty years on
warts and all
as they say.  

As if by magic
I’ve arrived suddenly
at my destination

one I predicted  
using only line to map
sagging jowls, face etched and a nose

grown to epic proportion.  
At least that’s how
I remember it

a masterpiece of draftsmanship
that captured the soul
of its subject, a man rendered

in short hand, gaze
bewildered when I was going
for bemused detachment.