You'll find yourself here,
not sure how you arrived.
But you won't question it.
The mayor is home: his apartment in the fire house.
His lamp is lit, and he is here to welcome you
Though you cannot see him
But you do not question it.
And you'll hear bells and the clopping of hooves ahead
of an old-style streetcar in the age
of the internal combustion engine,
infernal, before the world could burn.
But you won't question it,
No, it's all perfectly natural
As though you grew up here
And here you do grow up as you walk the street,
The buildings pressing ever closer together, merging
And you somehow grow taller.
As a fairytale castle looms ahead of you
As though it were in the sky.
It's color is a pink that
smells of cotton candy
and popcorn
and perhaps, a hotdog
It passes out of your view
Like a mirage or a whiff of cloud
As you smell the food
The advertising of smells
Seducing you away
You stop, and you look
And you don't see the tourists in shorts
And tennis-shoes, dressed slobby-chic for an expensive vacation
Or smell their sunscreen or see any sign
Any sign of change since that time, no
No, you don't see anything
Which you don't wish to see
You don't see a police station
Or cigarette butts on the pavement
Or a war memorial
Or a boarded-up building, closed.
All have been scooped up
Swept up, kept up by
white-uniformed sanitation officers
with little bow ties, discretely
cleaning up the world
But you will scarcely miss these things, nor
notice their absence and
You will not question it.
For this street is a wish,
A longing,
A child's prayers
Answered
For this is a place where no person,
No thing is old, but all is new
and useful and present:
As immediate as the trail of ice cream
making its osmotic way along
the edge of your sugar cone in the sun
And down to your sticky fingers.
The castle is there, you see now, but it's so
very far away.
There is no rush.
Step inside a shop—take your pick--and you will find
plush carpets, cooled rooms, parkay tile
Above the souvenirs and tchotchkes you will
Notice heart-stopping detail
In a light fixture
In a cherry wood crown molding
In Tiffany glass and marble counter-tops
Exquisite agony of
nostalgia for the half-remembered
And you're puzzled because you can't buy, here,
An old-fashioned ice-cream soda
With which your great-greats wooed each other
And fed each other, never considering, even
conceiving scandalous sensual jokes with whipped cream
And for this, today, you love them.
Your feet will amble you back and back again on themselves,
turned around (in spite of unmistakeable
castle-mountain-rocketship landmarks.)
There, Just behind these buildings, you're certain, there
should be a baseball diamond, alight with the noise
of boys playing with a stick and a ball
There, a neat row of stately, sabbatical victorians
There, a haphazard school yard with a tire swing
and a red schoolhouse, reliable as a sunrise
keeping protective watch behind it.
And you forget
racism
You forget
any war
You forget
your own
many sins
Like
vanished
cigarette
butts
And you smile, giving the uniformed man
peddling mouse-shaped balloons
a little more of your money
than he is asking for