Notes from the Isthmus

"The city, in contrast, seemed to be sizzling and frying with violent hungers. I saw violence against nature in the wanton disturbance of soils, whole acres scraped bare for construction, the bedrock shattered by dynamite blasts, hills cleft in two for highways..." – Tallmadge, from The Cincinnati Arch






One March day, particularly gray, a drizzle across the horizon,
and you have taken a walk along John Nolen
where the thick traffic curves at the shoreline of Monona
and what you see is the dismal streets piled up by dark snow,
vast filters, so to speak, of spit dirt from car wheels,
or white lungs, choiceless at street level, accepting exhaust.
The birds that day are the bounty of gulls. Their shrieks are solemn.
There is a touch of religiosity in the melting gray of March,
as if one brief expectation of a peeking sun would rally worship.
Another day, maybe morning, same precise scene, for we all take
this one many times. It is of the city's busiest and common.
Monona Terrace juts out of the city's belly out over the lake,
its blue windows now culling from the blue sky,
lake a farm of crystal. There is a couple out a way onto the ice.
One of them is pulling a small sled behind them toward a snow hut
that is no doubt slowly collapsing under warmer temperatures.
Today the splatters of the car wheels are of the variety we remember
from our youth as the mysteries of vast puddles used to form
for our jumping or thinly wading pleasure.
That same gull under an electric sun is an omen like a stark
voice from a more benevolent past.
You see yourself walking up among the mid-level skyscrapers
as the cafes are starved for their patios, outlined by wrought iron
holding you in inside your coffee dream
and for this day the lake city an island of gifts floating over water.