Pittsburgh 1988

Pittsburgh, where your ancient anchormen are proud
of believing that nothing is new
Pittsburgh is working out your erotic life
while your parents are in the next room debating
how much to put in the collection basket
this Sunday while watching transsexuals solemnly
talk on Sally Jessie Raphael

Pittsburgh is a computerized scalpel wreathed
in the smoke of a million cigarettes

Pittsburgh even your rush hours are inferior,
people walk farther to catch a bus in New York
than some of your buses run between stops

Pittsburgh, that never met a quarterback it didn't hate
Pittsburgh, younger than springtime and older
than Miami Beach
Pittsburgh is the accountant who spills his soul
to the knarled waitress at the Gateway lunch counter
and when his wife asks him what's new
he says nothing

Pittsburgh where your artists look forward
to your stunned silence as a sign of approval
Pittsburgh where the worst curse is, "That's differnt."

Pittsburgh with the loudest voices and the least to say
Pittsburgh the last city in the civilized world
where the biggest drug problem is your young addicted
to chewing tobacco

Pittsburgh so sure you're no good
that you can't let anyone criticize you
Pittsburgh your dumb people are proud of it
and your smart people are paralyzed with their
feelings of inferiority
Pittsburgh where intelligence
is the sin of pride
and self-pity
is the pride of the city

Pittsburgh is the beauty of the Iron and Glass
Bank building on Carson Street, still standing
because there was no reason to
tear it down
Pittsburgh is staggering out of a neighborhood bar
and seeing the downtown skyline above
the roof of the five and ten
Pittsburgh is the beauty of the hills, savage
and soft, that nobody knows how
to talk about

Pittsburgh too honest to lie to job interviewers
like you're supposed to
Pittsburgh you didn't want your children
to study art and now your mills
are going to be museums, detached
aesthetics of a lost civilization
and its unconscious beauty

Pittsburgh with not enough middle class blacks
to support an NBA franchise
Pittsburgh no longer worth being on the hit list
for Russian missiles, so even after the apocalypse
you will still be the most livable city

Pittsburgh do you have kids just so you can
scream at them,
recapitulating your own denied pain
and killing them loudly
with your ugly song

Pittsburgh, afraid of your feelings and
justifiably so
Pittsburgh, is there light
at the end of your tunnels?
Pittsburgh, what's that signpost up ahead?
Pittsburgh, hiding from time in your shopping malls
Pittsburgh is the deer hunter who shoots
a drunken driver when he mistakes a Subaru
for a five point buck
Pittsburgh your innocence is infuriating
and the reason we need you
Pittsburgh where masculinity means
you have to hate cats
Pittsbugh your women spend thousands of dollars
on clothes and cosmetics, hairstyling and jewelry,
then blow the whole effect
with a nickel piece of chewing gum

Pittsburgh we are all frightened and so
we are all you
Pittsburgh so confused now but that's all right
-you were not so wonderful as you thought you were

Pittsburgh, peaceful city, human city, let's build
on the basics
instead of just going back to them
Pittsburgh is a Lifeflite helicopter to a hospital
which will refuse to treat you because you have no insurance
Pittsburgh, world center for ugly white people, how long
has this convention been going on?
Pittsburgh is umbrellas with long fingernails,
and buffalo with wings
Pittsburgh, born under the sign of
If You're So Smart How Come
You Ain't Rich?
Pittsburgh slow to change,
but slow to turn on you.

Notes

a good deal of comedy in the slide trombone's
transit through dense armpits of light
gradient stars, flashing like lemons
chortling down the steep cobblestone streets
of all seven volcanic hills

we left the church together.
you had no panic in your eyes-
I wondered why, but dismissed my doubts
and accompanied you for your year of shopping.

That was our first/last tour of Europe
strained as violin strings over pizza-like smiles,
we flew on boats, on beds, on planes
learning no new languages yet.
I bought a hat.

Now, seven years after
our last/first tour of Europe
I remember your grin
and your hungers.
what a greedy girl you were

and what a guilty boy was I
to have loved that moment
away from you and your amateur friends
bathed in the dream of my twilight
outside the restaurant, musical re-enactment
of a perfect cliché, brass echoing heroic light
of dusk, woman
with accordion,
not my heart,
a musical instrument.

12/1988

Thunder and Lightning

The collapse of all visions
the air forced out of the storm
like thunder ignored, accommodated,
having long been explained
that the sky does not fall
fall
we've fallen
into this balanced step

uneasy compromise with
paralyzing intuitions
of the eye and bone
the lightning bright flash
gone before there
and then the crash

now we recognize without
seeing, reading the
shorthand of our familiar
landscapes, having lived here
so long. The flash
reminds, reassures, yet still
does not fully
illuminate.
We know everything
so we see nothing.

But the thunder is never quite
music
and the green edge of pain
is still the flesh of the whirling trees


5/1988

Roots

I put down my graceful roots
in the secretly famished land
where attendants eat my ear
and the sky has holes.

Invisible warning of green sucked
into blank fury
and tumbling blackness forever--
the black-hot eternity of hell

no one will speak well there
or battle back with colored clay,
checked ribbons and tablecloths,
wine with dinner.

In this universe of freely enterprising
explosions and hurtling fire
we are the ridiculous.

6/1986

It's the time

It's the time of
revision.
Yes, it is
at hand.

Your whole life,
what a phrase.
As wide as the earth
for anyone.

No dreams
of destruction destroy
the visions roundly noted.
Fragments of salvation,
literally.

It's the time
of revision, yes
it is at hand


7/1986

The Past

The past is a recessive gene
a hunk of algae in your head
that keeps dirtying up the pool of your life

The past is left-handed

The past has an eating disorder.
It eats disorder.
Several orders of disorder
at one sitting.

The past is the suit you got
without a fitting.

The past is a freight train at night
roaring through your temples.
The church bells of your past are ringing
for you and your various gals
and sundry mornings of reverence for
loveliness and confusion.

The past is a cataract
in the eye of the truth,
an emotional chip
on your front tooth.

The past is a limited toy
the fire engine of accomplishment
that's two inches high and breaks
it's plastic

The past is an iridescent dye
or the way your eye
looks to other people


If the present is names you can't remember
and faces you can't forget
the past is the opposite of that.

The past is a clean sweep
an onion eater
a world beater
a mad platter
on the lazy susan of your soul

The past exists to
give nostalgia
something to think about
to give art the life
of the artist's death
so the present can catch up
to the dubious future

the past is a cat in the hat
of Abraham Lincoln
Hitler's moustache
bleeding into Groucho's

the past masquerades as a series
of clichés
under the costume gleams the dagger!
you laugh, but the blade is sharp.
fortunately, the present
is an anesthetic.

The past is an aphrodisiac
you take the morning after.

1989