Animation by Corinne Heath
You Tube Channel Here: http://www.youtube.com/user/corheath
Corinne Heath Website Here:
http://www.corinneheath.com/
Poetry by Eric Prendergast, Bio Here: http://drawingofghosts.com/page10.html
from the chapbook of poetry, INFRASTRUCTURE.
INFRASTRUCTURE is the first published chapbook of poetry by Eric Prendergast. The collection examines in intimate
narrative the skeletal abstracts--social, psychological, and
symbolic--that support the flesh of our reality. Together, the
poems argue that the ideas that underlie our world are as
solid and essential as the industries that give it function.
Apreciation goes to Robbie Romero for corrections to the sequence of stops of the Chicago El train that I used in this poem.
Voice: Steve Braunginn
THROUGH A CITY THAT'S FORGOTTEN
POEM BY ERIC PRENDERGAST
The trains twist up and down this cramped coastline at the edge
of the world like Dickens's specters—noisy, burly, greedy for
more than their share of sound. They shake and crunch and shudder
and tumble along tracks that tie down this tired city in knots of rusted
metal and rotting wood. They spy in windows and under bridges as
they wander, warned off by chain link fences iced with barbed wire,
tossing up angry blue sparks at each stop.
I board at Howard.
A man in third-hand clothes is doing the rounds, begging alms from
one car to the next. A Gold Coast lover is slyly sliding a hand down
the long, long leg of his dearest Trixy. A Vietnamese housewife holds
a shouting match with her dead mother over a cellphone. A construction
worker holds his head in his hands, alone, the Virgin Mary sketched into
his back peaking out from under his shirt collar.
I sit down feeling I have seen these things before.
A driver who cannot stand silence mumbles through the loudspeaker about
bad dates and bird flu. At Belmont, he reminds riders not to forget their
saxophones. At Merchandise Mart, he is replaced with static punctuated
by the recording of a Midwestern man on too many uppers. I ask the
businesswoman beside me who she prefers, but she won't look up from
her copy of How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).
"Soliciting on CTA trains is prohibited. Violators will be arrested," the
recording reminds me with a meth inflection. I need reminders.
I switch at State and Lake, watching deadset jumpers scale the spines
of office towers as I wait for the Green Line train. A common problem
of urbanized societies. Waiting.
There was someone I waited with here, earlier. I said "I love you" as the
train arrived, I think, but he didn't hear me over the sound of screeching
wheels grinding to a halt. This probably explains everything that came after.
The scent of old cigarettes on his lips and the hard-on I had to cover over
with a copy of the Reader is all else I remember of him. Like most mislaid
memories, I've tied these to the closest convenient point of disembarkment.
At Garfield, twilight riders file in with the smell of cinder. Someone has set
fire to the schools and churches. I see little girls crunking under a streetlight
between 39th and 40th, their faces wild with smiles. I am struck dumb with
beauty, so I open my notebook, but there's blood on the page corners and it
isn't mine. There are many things we so soon forget.
The man beside me tells me about his condo on the lake and the grenades he
keeps in his closet. Then he asks me for a spare dollar.
At Cottage Grove I get off and the details slip away, the lines between the
dots thin into nothing, the things that make sense of this city get lost in the dark.
(Less)