Chicago and December

WS Di Piero

Trying to find my roost   one lidded, late afternoon,   the consolation of colour   worked up like neediness,   like craving chocolate,   I’m at Art Institute favourites:   Velasquez’s “Servant,”   her bashful attention fixed   to place things just right,   Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,”   whose fishy fingers seem   never to do a day’s work,   the great stone lions outside   monumentally pissed   by jumbo wreaths and ribbons   municipal good cheer   yoked around their heads.   Mealy mist. Furred air.   I walk north across   the river, Christmas lights   crushed on skyscraper glass,   bling stringing Michigan Ave.,   sunlight’s last-gasp sighing   through the artless fog.   Vague fatigued promise hangs   in the low darkened sky   when bunched scrawny starlings rattle up from trees,   switchback and snag like tossed rags dressing   the bare wintering branches,   black-on-black shining,   and I’m in a moment   more like a fore-moment:   from the sidewalk, watching them   poised without purpose,   I feel lifted inside the common   hazards and orders of things   when from their stillness,   the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds   erupt again, clap, elated weather- making wing-clouds changing,   smithereened back and forth,   now already gone to follow   the river’s running course.