"As I Walk on Whiskey Island in Winter, I Think of James Wright"

    I began in Ohio,

    I still think of home

                                James Wright (1927 – 1980)

 

    James, if you reach down hard

    enough with me through the Cleveland dirt

    layers of shale and garbage earth

    you and I might touch dreams

 

    and failed seeds of Irish root mothers

    those without names, frayed rope lives tied

    down on tin shanty roofs far from the bright

    sun of Western Ireland’s night.

 

    We might find stained glass

    from St. Mary’s of the Flats

    bottles of holy water blessed

    by Amadeus Rappe

    here on this island, on the edge

    of a sliding city

    at the beginning of another century

    of already too much pain.

     

    Your finger bones could rise from the grave

    and help me scribe the sounds of

    broken rosary beads buried

    in unsanctified ground,

    candled hymns and High Mass

    lights, hidden baptisms

    and rectory marriages

    intertwined with blessings

    from knotted Carmelite rope.

     

    The cracked tea cup

    stained brown inside

    at the bottom leaves of green tea

    gone

    like the reader and her readings.

     

    And further on to the south and west

    past hills time and swamp tales

    of Ohio City, we could discover

    petrified tracks patiently waiting

     

    inside clay cliffs or fields of abandoned story

    You could help me find words, create heel an toe casts

    from Cleveland Steel’s hired Pinkerton men; or my grandfather and his

            union friends

    hiding out at night- afraid to go home-

    and bring the weight of violent shoes to narrow wooden steps.

     

    We two, could shine halogen lights and search

    for the trace and smell of sweat hanging

    from haloed images of longshoremen’s heads;

    the boys fresh from the docks,

     

    as they stood at the main corner of the Angle,

    Detroit and old Pearl; watching greenhorn girls

    walk past after a day of service with the millionaires

    on Euclid Avenue;

     

    Unaware of the future

    only we can see;

    a cathedral wedding and twelve priest Mass

    or lives magnetized by bar stools and beer bottles.

    All mere memory shapes; holograms and dance shoes

    sticking to us like nightclothes on hot summer nights.

     

    But maybe, all we can find are residue of oak tree limbs

    fallen and scattered into an American hope for coal

    blooming into diamonds of rust

    while the Midwest lake and its ceaseless winds

    embrace a crying banshee reconnoitering for the soul ashes

    of the forgotten dead.