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Poetry Video: DVDs, Course, Guide, Book
. . . gives old family memories a new media heart
Robert Kirschten, Ph.D.
MY MOTHER’S KINDERGARDEN CLASSROOM
Esmond School, Chicago
If you walk down the hall, you can still hear the music.
She will play it for you, again and again, year after year:
the same songs you heard when you were five.
Listen. Listen harder.
You can hear it all, every note, every dance step
when it was easy for your to lift your legs, clap your hands,
and skip sideways around the painted circle
in the middle of her room.
If you don’t return, now and then, to the Esmond School,
your hearing grows faint with those melodies; the smell
of City-of-Chicago varnish evaporates like an oasis
in the sandbox;
your farsightedness no longer daydreams the warm,
inner mysteries
of the cloakroom, where she stored the secrets
of mismatched galoshes and the key to chocolate milk.
If you won’t spend
a minute sitting around the scuffed, red circle of time,
legs crossed, waiting for recess, you will never rise
to the occasion
when music and memory call your name for the roll
of sudden invention, with a bright, silver star for attendance.
To return, all you need do is stand up, face the flag, and sing three times,
“Good morning, Mrs. Kirschten. How do you do?”
She will begin her class--even as safety scissors cut
childhood from your hands--with “The Pledge of Allegiance”
and “My Country tis of Thee,”
then send you back home on your first day for lunch
with a blue-green yellow-purple picture of three smiling
paper daisies
and my mother’s hand-played, musical note pinned to your sleeve
for the rest of your life:
“As I was walking down the street,
A little friend I chanced to meet.
Hi ho. Hi ho. Hi ho. Hi ho.
A riggedy jig and away we go.”
OLD FAMILY MOVIES
Underexposed, still the mid-fifties
flicker clearly enough
through these spliced Christmas cuttings,
this eight-millimeter lantern
of tin,
grinding out years
that had darkened from me slowly
like theatre lights.
The film jumps,
frame runs into frame
juggling characters
like overweight acrobats
nervous on opening night,
but a knob
adjusts the past
and again the early morning
rituals of toys
decorate my childhood.
Pine wreaths, straw beneath
kings camel-backed in ermine,
choirs of German candles,
the tree
a live-wired mosaic
in water,
all these
crowd now to memory
like relatives to a table.
And toasts hands glasses filling the screen,
the lens widening drawn back faces, mirrors
of joy: aunts, uncles, father all are children
reborn of machine-light the shimmering umbilical
unwinding minutes fragile as an uncle’s cigar smoke.
At reel’s end adults’ eyes champagne-sparkling
a final close-up, the screen blinding to sunspots
then whiteness. Yet beheld by me still are scenes
of different tone: telephone calls from
the hospital a child’s surprise at death
long expected, mortality emerging from corridors
wrapped in white tile, tubes, dials never
to be played with. To be touched, only
in reflection, bright absence of real hue color of
time the ever-leaving guest uninvited, but
even then, acquainted with my father, his brothers
and sisters their heart-attacks and cancers.
The empty reel slows on its spindle.
On the lamp unplugged for the projector, tinsel
glinting.
Street light slices through gray curtains.
His firs grow over the house.
As his child, I learned there was a picture
for everything:
ice and rain, permanence and change.
Bethlehem’s romance, then, illuminating all
with its narrative of ornament.
The machine is off; what could not be seen
begins.
My hands folded, watching.
Pine needles darken into the new year.
EDWARD HOPPER'S PAINTING "NIGHTHAWKS, " 1942
Art Institute, Chicago
You find no filament
illuminating this 1940's all-night cafe
with its incandescent ceiling
blazing
in a scalene horizontal
of pale yellow.
Instead of electric globes,
your eye encounters spectral glare
flung outward in wedges
as if beaming from
above three lone patrons:
one back-turned faceless fedora
at the counter
and a couple with fixed gaze
of aluminum coffee urns.
For Hopper's light radiates coldly
from within forms,
not from the unseen street lamp
or fluorescent tubes,
but within these blue-streaking shadows
pointing inside
from the pavement
like a string of fallen pennants.
Even as the starched late-shift attendant
bends toward empty stools, his uniform reflects
only the artist's austere harmony
of faded whites with
the hour's dazzling numbness.
If you peer closer,
what you thought a plate glass window,
like familiar laws of light,
vanishes
into Hopper's framing
of that neon corner grill you pass,
not noticing
these same glazed stares,
perched nightly
in vitreous isolation.
from FOUR CHICAGO FEASTS
CHICAGO DEEP-DISH PIZZA
--medium Special
You are down to your last slice.
You ate the whole thing almost. It must have weighed
almost five pounds.
You couldn't stop yourself after 2 small spoons of chopped fresh basil
began deep down to bite into your tastebuds
along with
the tantalizing teaspoon of opulent oregano,
spicing
up
the plush-red plum tomatoes.
When the pungent parmesan met the molten mozzarella,
your hot tongue
deep-kissed the deep delight of deep dish
that is
the true taste of Chicago.
You ate the rich, Italian soul food of the city's soul:
layer after layer, cheese after big cheese, sausage
after the satisfaction
of knowing that gluttony in Chicago
is often
its own glorious reward.
Finish it off. Go ahead.
So what if you now weigh more than the Wrigley Building?
This is pizza. This is Chicago.
This is Chicago pizza.
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