Detroit
We are stardust in the fearful void,
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This land is our father whose hair is jet;
it is our mother who is beautiful:
Antimony eyes, pomegranate lips...
County guys bring bitumen to fill
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life of peaks and valleys, highs and lows!
mom and dad sing to us until we shine!
The last drive-in picture show in Detroit,
filled with the gaudy films of memory:
when we were homicide perp-walk city!
Space heaters and cracked plaster...
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Going to Quebec to bury Aunt Stell,
a boy says "Hear yer from Hockey Town, eh?"
No comic epitaphs, no eulogy;
We are the Bedouin of this New Age.
The Old Kingdom gives way to the New;
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nor imitation - was the harmony
of the spheres that drove our autos a while...
bring us our Prom Tux limos of desire!
bring us industry Elijah hearses of fire!
On the river there's the Don't-Look-Back Shack
most people call the Renaissance Center,
but history is coke and cognac...
that's suicide by a two-liter!
--
notes
Detroit
look to the future, not the past.
perp-walk : the walk from the DA's office to the jail
coke and cognac: suicide drink; I knew a fellow Marcus who loved it. He was in love with a beautiful girl who lived in Ontario. When she split, he killed himself. He could not live in the future without his past continuing on.
Bedouins: to the eye of moderns, a poor people, but the basis of the future when the cities have died.
I did not plan on having two Detroit poems, one after another, but that's life in the big city.
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