Attempts at Love in Negaunee

Sun down by six. Road-salt rusted Fords bog
Into driveways, slush-packed wheel wells throttled
Snug. Tailpipes croak. Neighbors wade toward
Hibernations, slick-cement porched vaults
Mistaking opaque for peace. Snow falls all night.
Falls numb. Streets are bottlenecked about your past,
Parents' dead-end. Lamposts hang deadpan mugs,
Stasis with no penance, only the hard spray off the blade
Of the city plow, the bark of cold pavement and metal.

Your dad drove dump truck steady midnights,
A thirty-four year noctambulation that stalked him home.
You never saw them hug. Never coo. Only an occasional
Cold knock, headboard on plaster, ending sober, ending
In the rattle of backdoor-clapped panes. Your mother poured you
Silver-dollar pancakes. She called you back from the window,
From your father's orange boot-prints fleeing to the bar,
A release you were barred from, a foreign euphoria:
Brick, bland neon, thick oak door, tarnished metal handle.

It was your mother's body you grew into. Of age,
You opened the oak door to find the tables vacant, bottles
Of schnapps in rows blocking the mirror, the bar crowded
By a chain of smoke-coated forms slouched over noon beers,
Squinting your silhouette until the smug till's ding-jutting
Mandible turned them away, opened their wallets like the mouths
Of choking walleye. In dim communion they buried warmth
In their throats, hours swallowed in a humdrum jukebox psalm,
Lukewarm nods stagnated into haven. You were too late
To take your father home. The towel on the bartender's shoulder
Had stolen his kisses from the glasses.

Snow falls all night and drifts threaten the windows.
The streets narrow. They are your streets. You walk them
And prospects expire. You clip coupons, you pay rent.
You scrape ice from your car windows at dawn. You kneel
In the bile, in slow digestion next to the VFW, the St. Vinnies,
The unkept bars that keep soliciting sore miners, blizzards
In their minds. The horizon drops in jigsaw tatters. Years
Won't pan out, toil toward lucid curbs. Plows roar
Through the night, large and orange and lost. You embrace
This fallow lineage, dredge the cellar for the boots
Of your dead father. Trod circles in snow.

copyright 2003 Kevin Kainulainen