Читать книгу This Carting Life - Rustum Kozain - Страница 18

Southbound: leaving Chicago by Greyhound

I’m back here, interfaced

With a dead phosphorescence;

The whole town smells

Like the world’s oldest anger.

– Yusef Komunyakaa, ‘Fog Galleon’

Sears Tower juts up on the right

into pale, Lake Michigan sky.

Ahead, smoke thickens: another

Southside fire from the oldest anger.

At the stop on 95th, black faces

in the street focus for a second on me

as sunlight breaches the tinted glass.

We recognise each other. Here at last

are many who see me

not as foreigner or curio

but one of them, on a lonely trip.

The bus leaves. The day kites

like freshly ironed cotton

though Chicago’s skyline fades

as designs fade on Chinese T-shirts

sold on Cape Town’s tourist squares.

Here, the united colours of America

dull, and become Southside charcoal

smeared through trees brittle

as ornamental coral; trees that strain

at minnows trailing thread-like turds,

jetting high above. Yellow-and-black

school buses wallow, flounder

like lost, bloated tiger fish

caught in winter’s dun grass.

Vacant used-auto lots span

their obligatory rainbows

taut in gunmetal-old oil patches …

The bus whales through the mind’s currents

veers due south, takes the Skyway

and exits from acres of cracked billboards.

I’ve been here not so long

but long enough to know

how coal-heavy barges slowly sink

in blanched green canals;

how Gary, Indiana festers:

a boil of smokestacks, air ducts

thick knots of pipe and cable

dark as vein and muscle

where the earth ruptures

as disease confronts itself.

But men still fish here, from dams

dug jig-saw snug against each other

and reflecting the white pustules

of nearby chemical tanks.

Beyond lie four lone stone arches

crumbling: a low bridge

that once carried trains

over this drained swamp

lies now in ruins

in a huddle of young decay.