Past Skokie lawns flat as cemeteries
and airport buildings passing the sherbet colors of evening
down Harms Road, past the College Prep Academy, a group of boys
hacks through June’s first greenery
dreaming of the city on the other side, Lake Michigan’s
icy cut, mafiosos trailing blue Fibonacci spirals of smoke
from speakeasies and casinos. They don’t know
that other city, the ghost city beneath the lake, zoned
within its loneliness like a boy on the last day
of his childhood, turning inward to a shore unknown
to his father and brothers, the sheer blue panels
of a Calder mobile. The lake is full of stories, voices
and stories, boys stripped naked to the waist
and flayed by poison ivy, boys becoming
trees, becoming air, the circus of clouds moving silently
across the Plains suffused with light
from a distant star and floating back to earth, becoming the men
who work the great belching factories of Detroit
and Kenosha, expressions forged in steel, who press the levers
and pistons resounding in the vast cathedral
of work, holiest of names unspoken, the evening clouds
piling one atop the other, concatenating
like stories, twisting, funneling, each more intricate
than the last, bone-delicate and pale, sifted from the throats
of boys who float chained to one another
and the shore, a line of empty boats rocking end to end
in the fathomless kingdom of night.
