who cannot know
that even as we wronged my wife,
in union we created God. In come-cries
caught in the throat, we made Him.
And made Him ours, gave Him some voice
even as He was in the still of night
as He is now, inchoate
before the hard and burning stars.
Turyalai and Nurbibi were accused of adultery and stoned to death by the Taliban in November 1996.
Southbound: leaving Chicago by Greyhound
I’m back here, interfaced
With a dead phosphorescence;
The whole town smells
Like the world’s oldest anger.
– Yusef Komunyakaa, ‘Fog Galleon’
Sears Tower juts up on the right
into pale, Lake Michigan sky.
Ahead, smoke thickens: another
Southside fire from the oldest anger.
At the stop on 95th, black faces
in the street focus for a second on me
as sunlight breaches the tinted glass.
We recognise each other. Here at last
are many who see me
not as foreigner or curio
but one of them, on a lonely trip.
The bus leaves. The day kites
like freshly ironed cotton
though Chicago’s skyline fades
as designs fade on Chinese T-shirts
sold on Cape Town’s tourist squares.
Here, the united colours of America
dull, and become Southside charcoal
smeared through trees brittle
as ornamental coral; trees that strain
at minnows trailing thread-like turds,
jetting high above. Yellow-and-black
school buses wallow, flounder
like lost, bloated tiger fish
caught in winter’s dun grass.
Vacant used-auto lots span
their obligatory rainbows
taut in gunmetal-old oil patches …
The bus whales through the mind’s currents
veers due south, takes the Skyway
and exits from acres of cracked billboards.
I’ve been here not so long
but long enough to know
how coal-heavy barges slowly sink
in blanched green canals;
how Gary, Indiana festers:
a boil of smokestacks, air ducts
thick knots of pipe and cable
dark as vein and muscle
where the earth ruptures
as disease confronts itself.
But men still fish here, from dams
dug jig-saw snug against each other
and reflecting the white pustules
of nearby chemical tanks.
Beyond lie four lone stone arches
crumbling: a low bridge
that once carried trains
over this drained swamp
lies now in ruins
in a huddle of young decay.
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