Blue Evening on Poetry Street

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There is a certain urban block in the commercial district of town which I think of as Poetry Street because some years ago the downtown business association subsidized the installation there of three tons of poetry on panels laid into the concrete sidewalk. Neither this project nor other similar gentrification-through-the-arts efforts on the same block have done much to alter its bleak and seedy character, however.


Poetry Street

On Poverty Street, the disinterested

click of Dixie Cups on bakelite trays

reminds me that prose exists.


The winter has been long and hard. It has taken its toll on the transient citizenry. Still there remains a tiny spring of hope in the internal biological clock of everything that lives. One reaches out gratefully to grasp at the slightest of encouraging signs, even when they are illusory.

After a few days of gentler weather early in the week, this evening a cold drizzle returns. Into the wet blue fog the street lighting of the avenue casts an eerie orange-red glow. The ghostly figures of street drifters shuffling and huddling, loitering with and without intent, populate the night much as dark vessels afloat in a polluted river. Small puffs of breath emanating seem to tug the body bundles along. These random shifting configurations, representing what passes for social organization. In such stunned and affectless times, who can know what lies beyond the opaque physical representation.

It was once thought that souls bereft in the underworld could not return across the river Styx.

A bearded white man of indeterminate age approaches the avenue from a side street, howling as he comes. Pedestrians and idlers step aside before him, as in a parting of the waters. Two young blind men, slender, Asian, tapping the sidewalk uncertainly with long white sticks, clinging to one another for support, stop motionless in fear at the corner, their heads swiveling as might those of frightened forest creatures, sniffing at the air. The howling man is on a collision course with them. Standing frozen at the corner where the avenue meets the side street, the blind men are without knowing it directly in his path, blocking the sidewalk. Beneath their feet a cast iron and porcelain enamel plaque sunk into the pavement displays a poem in praise of the California Poppy, designated flower of the Golden State.

Just as he is about to make contact with the blind men, I reach out and gently touch the howling man's arm. He stops howling, his head whips toward me, his eyes appearing to roll back down to earth from some remote planet where life has long since been extinguished. Yo, I say. They can't see you. He looks at me, then at the two terrified and cowering blind men, a split second goes by. Heaven has opened for a moment to bless and protect its own. The bearded man steers around the blind men, crosses the avenue against the flow of traffic, ignoring a red light. When he reaches the other shore, he begins once again to howl. It is an unearthly outcry, reaching up into the night, gradually growing fainter as he moves away from the avenue.

Evening/Sail: Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1970, copyright Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Tate Gallery)
noise absorbed: Larry Eigner, poetry panel from the Addison Street Project