balance

[Chicago Avenue at Winchester Street]

long nights

[Above Augusta Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

we are the unimagined facts

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Friends, we are the unimagined
Facts of love and disappointment,
Walking among you with faces
You know you should recognize,
Haunting your deaths with the England
We speak for, which finds you
No home for the moment or ever.
You will know what we mean, as you meant
How you lived, your defeated majority
Handing us on to ourselves.
We are the masters now. The park's
A rainy country, ruining
The shoes you saved to wear to death,
In which we buried you.

"Revenants," Sean O'Brien

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

plume

[California Avenue at Chicago Avenue]

where you're caught for an instant in the brightness

Don't tell me you've never dreamed of this –
of waking in a room with a wide open window,

the air clear and ringing after night rain;
of needing no other reason than a sky

the unbelievable blue of which
sends you flitting deftly through the house

past the year-old jar of nails and flies,
the pile of dishes in the sink, and out the back door

where you're caught for an instant in the brightness
because the future's so much easier than you'd thought –

slipping your heart under the rosebush like a key,
everything you need in the canvas bag

resting lightly at your hip
and life as simple as turning left or right.

"As I Walked Out," Esther Morgan

[Ukrainian Village]

ticking like an electric fence

Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,
A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.

"Human Chain," Seamus Heaney

[Chicago Avenue at Damen Avenue]

spirit is a far cry

What do you call
the muscle we long with? Spirit?
I don’t think so. Spirit is a far cry. This
is a casting outward which
unwinds inside the chest. A hole
which complements the heart.
The ghost of a chance.

"Twinflower," Don McKay

[Damen Avenue above Haddon Street]

full of ghosts tonight

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

"What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)," Edna St. Vincent Millay

[Chicago Avenue east of California Avenue]

a blue light radiates

A blue light
radiates from my clothing.
Midwinter.
Clattering tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a silent world
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled across the border.

"Midwinter," Tomas Tranströmer

[Damen Avenue at Chicago Avenue]

shirtsleeves the whole night

The train stopped far south. It was snowing in New York.
Here you could go about in shirtsleeves the whole night.
But no one was out. Only the cars
flew past in their glare, flying saucers.

"Oklahoma," Tomas Tranströmer

[Chicago Avenue west of Winchester Street]

a sort of bloom on them

The dog barks, the caravan passes on.
The words had a sort of bloom on them
But were weightless, carrying past what was being said.

"Grand Galop," John Ashbery

[California Avenue west of Chicago Avenue]

memories in groups

Lone chimes speak silence, memories in groups beneath the trees,
cows sad in the dusk. Behind the young shepherds a cloud
was bleating at the sunset.

"Engraving," Yannis Ritsos

[Chicago Avenue and Damen Avenue]

out so early

“One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago I met a little girl with a book under her arm. I asked her why she was out so early and she answered that there were too many books and far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”
~ Tove Jansson

[Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

blue nights

"Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue... I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost... The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her."

"Blue Nights," Joan Didion

[Thessaloniki]

acquainted with the night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

"Acquainted with the Night," Robert Frost

[Armitage Avenue looking east at Spaulding Street]