Chicago, 1959

Sometimes I wish I could have lived

someone else’s poem

and go back to Chicago to ride

the Ravenswood ‘L’ through landscapes

of dis-integrated streets with John Dickson,

or live in New York and watch Dorothy Blake

draw [another] long line of phlegm

[and] ooze it into the open bottle

on her school desk alongside Len Roberts’.

I could sing along in silence

while riding to Smithville Methodist church

with Stephen Dunn from New Jersey;

or pump the vibrato’s thin blade

and stir the molecules of sound

with Michael Collier in Phoenix, Arizona;

or even live in Williamsport, Pennsylvania

and play a game of sandlot baseball

in an empty lot, ringed by elms and fir

and honeysuckle with Gregory Djanikian.

But this is the poem I lived

a long time ago in the old neighborhood,

a place where we played ring-a-levio in gangways,

where alley rats were our only fear

lurking in dark corners of cold-water flats

while we played on past nine o’clock,

and lovers embraced in dark passageways

outside unlocked doors throughout the night.

It was a time when little boys

in Davy Crockett hats

imagined they were defending the Alamo,

and little girls in strapped-on roller skates rolled along

treeless sidewalks while we played fast pitch

against a lit-up humming factory wall

far beneath six thousand city stars

without ozone, kidnapping or terrorists’ alerts.

It was a place where teen-age gals,

wrapped in poodle skirts, bobby socks

and Angora sweaters, danced with guys

with Brylcreem-slicked hair,

who snapped their fingers

to I Only Have Eyes for You

while doo-wopping around Chevy convertibles

with fuzzy dice and Bobby loves Sharon

air brushed on both sides.

It was also the first time in forty years

since the White Sox played in the World Series,

and for eight days Chicago forgot

America was at the helm of the world

with Dwight D. Eisenhower,

that rock ‘n’ roll was just four years old,

and Chryslers and Cadillacs sported wings

for tail lights.

For one week we didn’t care

about Gidget and Little Joe, and two monkeys

hurling through space over Illinois, New York,

New Jersey, Arizona, and Pennsylvania,

and the rest of the forty-five states

when Dinah Shore launched good-night kisses

to us all under the mid-September, Soviet moon. 

“Chicago, 1959” was originally published with a different title by Lake Shore Publishing, 1995.