Academic journal article Field
Midwest Blues Leave Me Shining
Article excerpt
Blue streetlight on the snow-limned trees like butaned rocksalt,
on the post office & bar, on the red brick buildings
with plywood lidded over their windows,
& lightless houses with letters nailed
to their doors-
the doors like bulletin boards, making demands of the missing-
but the flesh that is kin to light & grass & wing
is nowhere on the smalltown street.
Third poorest county in the U.S., by last measure, by best guess,
but it could be anywhere, it could be a hundred towns in the Midwest
with two places open, & neither a grocery store,
where old trucks sit in driveways, heavy enough to bookend
the Book of the Dead, Midwest edition.
And luck's rare as a three-legged cat,
like the one that Higgs bosons its way each evening
through the deer-picked garden
next door, little shadow, little hopalong shadow,
if I didn't have bad luck I'd have no luck at all.
Foxrare like gold dust,
scarce as you, Old Ghost,
as sunshine after sundown, the golden capillaries of a wounded body
we never see, an aortic elsewhere, but one that passes through us-
like rain through the earth, through the ribs of the dead,
this unseen body,
body of muons & neutrinos, Old Ghost, someday
the wounds will put our doubts to rest. …