A ray

Chicago Avenue at California Avenue.

no moon and the stars sparse

Long ago in Kentucky, I, a boy
Stood by a dirt road at first dark
And heard the great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them
There being no moon and the stars sparse.
I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart.
It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore, they were going north.
The sound was passing northward.

Tell me a story.
In this century in moment of mania
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.

"Audubon: A Vision," Robert Penn Warren

[Chicago Avenue at Winchester Street]

Blink

 Damen Avenue below Haddon Street, December 2012.

CHICAGOANS.
Photographs by Ray Pride.
July 5-August 3, 2012.
Atomix Café.
1957 West Chicago Avenue.
Chicago.         
Contact at raypri.de

balance

[Chicago Avenue at Winchester Street]

long nights

[Above Augusta Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

we are the unimagined facts

alt="Kansas anymore">


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]