Read an Excerpt
Streets in Their Own Ink
By Stuart Dybek Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2004 Stuart Dybek
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-52991-8
CHAPTER 1
Windy City
The garments worn in flying dreams
were fashioned there —
overcoats that swooped like kites,
scarves streaming like vapor trails,
gowns ballooning into spinnakers.
In a city like that one might sail
through life led by a runaway hat.
The young scattered in whatever directions
their wild hair pointed, and gusting
into one another, fell in love.
At night, wind rippled saxophones
that hung like windchimes in pawnshop
windows, hooting through each horn
so that the streets seemed haunted
not by nighthawks, but by doves.
Pinwheels whirred from steeples
in place of crosses. At the pinnacles
of public buildings, snagged underclothes —
the only flag — flapped majestically.
And when it came time to disappear
one simply chose a thoroughfare
devoid of memories, raised a collar,
and turned his back on the wind.
I closed my eyes and stepped
into a swirl of scuttling leaves.
Autobiography
1
Beneath the dripping udders
of tar paper roofs
a boy with a stolen jackknife
pries winter from spring.
That's how I'd begin,
with the smell of mud,
and icicles slipping into rain
as widows pass
unbalanced between shopping bags,
lugging mysterious griefs
by the scruff to novenas.
2
Our Lady of Sorrows,
the Black Virgin of Czestochowa,
was my girlfriend.
Once, while praying,
I saw her smile.
Any old woman
palsied with love and terror
I called babushka.
No word in English turns
a scarf into a grandmother.
3
And every morning was a requiem
or the feast day of a martyr —
the priest in red or black,
cortege of traffic, headlights
funneling through incense
under viaducts. While my surplice
settled around me like smoke
my father rode the blue spark
of a streetcar to the foundry
where, in the dark mornings,
the cracks of carbonized windows
flowed with the blood of stained glass.
4
Actually, by noon
the streets were ordinary —
lampposts, sparrows, sewers —
but we knew behind the light
there were other streets
transfigured by a reverence
I can't explain, where
hoodlums stood hooded in violet
like statues in Lent,
and whores were blue
from kissing police.
5
There were autobiographies
at every corner,
legends, litanies, manifestos,
memoirs in forgotten tongues,
h a silent hiss
in every t'anks.
Autobiographies, but no history,
and by the clang of evening Angelus
the babble condensed into a drone
murmured behind a jukebox sax
tailing from an open bar.
6
When it rained on Eighteenth Street
I believed that rain was falling
all over the world. I believed
the neighborhood's war dead were buried
beneath the plaque of their names
on the corner Victory garden,
and I worried that if people kept dying
the earth would be used up for cemeteries.
I worried that if we kept using
the same notes over
we'd run out of songs.
7
As one grows up into rebellion,
the dead slowly vanish.
Later, perhaps, they reappear.
Sometimes, I'd still catch glimpses
of that parish of phantoms
childhood borders — spirits
locked in a mazurka with a crucifix,
rumors expelled from a confessional,
wading a gutter under streetlights
as if blood, instead of April muck,
swirled around their black galoshes.
8
I've left out nothing;
these images are what I learned.
It's not that I didn't listen,
but it wasn't my language
in matters of sex or money.
What might have been told
was abandoned like excess baggage,
and the commonplace has assumed
the mysterious presence
of the lost.
9
What I finally remember is feeling
free. That's how I'd end, walking off
into an epilogue of the present
where allegiance is pledged to dream
rather than to tarnished emblems
of memory. Its flag of wind snaps
over a republic stoked by the energy
required to forget continents.
Each personal revolution equal
in a mass migration out of history.
Each step, a further separation;
my story, another voice receding
behind the solo of a saxophone
noodling through broken English.
Bath
She mops a washcloth down his spine and scrubs
until his bones glow with the inner light of porcelain
and when his Haloed hair bursts into foam
he holds his nose and dunks beneath the soapy gloom
ears flooding with signals
the pipes transmit like microphones.
The boy can hear another city, the one below
where wind coils when it isn't howling,
can hear Purgatory boil
up through the manholes, a river flushing souls
into the underworld, tomorrow's news
bawled at the crossroad of subway and sewer.
If he were accidentally to swallow here
the water would taste like silver
off a dead man's eyes. Upstairs,
the mute émigré waitress he secretly
adores sings naked in the shower,
the newlyweds from Mexico
rage about dinero, next door
a newborn wails like a Black Maria,
while in a hidden room, a crazy old man
won't stop repeating "the goddamn, the goddamn!"
And then the boy comes up for air,
eyes burning, rinsed hair silky, his hands
wrinkled, Busha says, as prunes.
Overhead, the bare bulb fogs with steam.
She jerks the plug, the drain
gulps a vortex of gray bathwater.
It's time to rise before it sucks him down,
to stand calf-deep, lacquered with Ivory,
smoldering before a faucet that trickles
a cool stream at which Busha washes him
first gently in front and then behind
in a way that no one else will ever wash him.
The moon, too, must be fogged above
misted lamps that bleed into reflections
on the marbled pane.
He swipes abstractions in the sweat,
finger painting night
while Busha towels his hair
as if reviving a drowned sailor
the sea has graciously returned.
Don't worry, Busha, your grandson is clean
for Saturday night:
ears, navel, nails, inspected,
teeth unstained, cleansed as baptism
leaves the soul, pure enough to sleep —
as you instruct him — with the angels,
cleaner than he'll ever be again.
The Volcano
It rose from an industrial wasteland
at the end of the block
and loomed over the neighborhood,
but only at night were its true dimensions
visible: a mountain of darkness,
its cone consumed from within
like a coal, porous with seismic tunnels
leaking searchlights, magma stoked
behind blackened, vandalized windows,
the night shift in the caldera
burning off spirit in updrafts
of sparks, the smudged moon a cinder
adrift in plumes of chimney smaze.
To those below, born in its shadow,
ash was the natural smell of air.
They thought its tremors were their own
suppressed emotions, its molten
eruptions the lust night drew
from their bodies. They never noticed,
come morning, how they'd been recast
going about their daily routines:
a butcher, his cleaver hacked
into igneous lamb; an old babushka
who'd stooped to pick fairy rings
on her way to mass. There,
a woman hanging stone sheets;
here, a man caught in the flow
just as he'd raised a hand
to strike his son
or brush the hair from his eyes.
The Sunken Garden
Over a back-alley fence woven from morning
glory vines I'd drop into a sunken garden
behind the sinking bungalow of a witch
from Warsaw who'd been displaced
to an asylum on Twenty-third, hidden in foliage.
The efflorescence was what was foreign.
I've forgotten my recurrent dreams
set there, except for one in which I lived
in a hutch with a wild rabbit.
When I woke that winter morning for school,
I left him behind, although I continued to hope
that some night, across the border of sleep,
we'd meet again. Alley cats barely survived
our neighborhood's Hitler youth,
and I never saw a rabbit in her garden,
but there were yellow birds — finches, probably —
I thought of as a gang of caged canaries
escaped into the wild, twittering with freedom
as if tuned to her orchestra of wind chimes.
Swallowtails hovered on the updrafts
of their shadows. It was a workers' paradise
for bees. I'd catch them in snapdragons
and cradle the furiously buzzing blossoms
for blocks, back to our flat, to throw
at my younger brother. I'd like to think
it was my way of bringing him flowers.
Fish Camp
In the Coleman's glassy glare
my brother's switchblade
unriddles backlash. A bullhead,
the weight of a rat,
flops in the dirt, dropped
when its spine added a scar
to the lines of my palm.
Bullheads should utter some cry.
Someone should have warned
those city boys, fishing at night
on the shore of a dump,
how gills, drowning in air, gape
like wounds that won't heal;
someone should have taught them
how to kill and properly gut
what they lured out of darkness.
Benediction
The fly is giving another sermon;
we bow to mud, receiving absolution from a worm.
Impatient with the pace of prayer
— the journey's too long to make on our knees —
we scour the alleys for discarded slogans,
for proverbs banned from Bibles,
ignited by guitars — electric fire
branding air with a graffiti of psalms.
My clothesline whip drove wind and stars;
pigeons, not ponies, pulled my droshky.
At dusk, we traced the peddler's dirge
to the misted mouth
of a viaduct that swallowed full moons.
The horizon was strung on the other side,
but when a border of boxcars rumbled its drums
we fled down the neon tail
of the comet known as Cermak Road.
Night was that narrow —
a strip of darkness between shop signs.
Snow fell from the height
of a streetlamp.
I knew the names of seven attending angels
but was seventeen before I saw
my first jay.
Yet I worshipped the natural world
like an immigrant
in an adopted country —
the one in which he should have been born.
For me, the complexity of a grasshopper
catapulting
from the Congo behind a billboard
was irrefutable proof
of God and his baffling order.
And in my heart
I still kneel on a weed lot in summer,
seeking benediction
beneath the glittering cross
of a dragonfly.
Ginny's Basement
A green light filtered
through the morning glory vines
that twined through rusty screens
against sooty little panes
of windows level with the weeds.
We were deeper than the tulip bulbs
glowing under flower beds,
than the tangled roots of zinnias,
forget-me-nots, and hollyhocks
that hung their heads
beneath a noon sun
native to her wild backyard.
Down crumbling steps
mortared with moss,
we'd descended
from summer's feverish perfume
to the cool damp reek of drains,
from the tweet of flirting songbirds
and torqued thrum of bees
to the nasal echoes
of underground mains
toward which startled water bugs
scurried.
There was an odor of shadow
and cats, of moldering lint,
a sneezy scent of spilled detergent —
blue trails of Fab
that led to a wringer wash machine
gagged on a bedspread.
The furnace door stood open
like a tabernacle looted of flame.
The low, unfinished ceiling
required that we bow
beneath its canopy
of clothesline and live wires
snubbed in electric tape.
A necklace of cold sweat
beaded from tarnished pipes.
At a workbench, a vise
clenched a sawed strip of molding.
I tried to erase
the prints my sneakers
tracked through sawdust.
Deeper than they plant the dead,
beneath windows veined
with morning glory vines,
a ledge of pickle jars
filled with bolts and washers
reflected, like dusty concave mirrors,
the flash of skin
as her unbuttoned sundress fell
to the cobwebbed case of empties
at the base of her spine.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Streets in Their Own Ink by Stuart Dybek. Copyright © 2004 Stuart Dybek. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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