Sodium lights cast pale peach
over the rain-glazed granite, brick and sandstone
as a few overlooked flourescents still hum behind greasy factory windows.
The coarse concrete of the bridges
is chipped away here and there
exposing the rust
that bleeds from the iron rebar.
By this hour nearly everything’s closed –
the courthouse, law offices, banks,
the jewelry stores with heavy cases and medicinal smelling proprietors,
the body shops, the formal wear outlet and the cosmetology school.
The shop signs with blocky business names and brushstroke slogans
are still such sources of pride
for the shopkeepers' ghosts, leaning in the doorways of places that used to be.
But no one sees them.
The day shift beat a hasty retreat at 5:00,
the lawyers to their Pottery Barned homes in Mountain Brook and Vestavia,
the clerks to their cheap apartments in Southside and Tarrant.
The only ones left
are a few homeless, a few roving cops,
and, swaggering out of the karaoke bar,
a group of restless young men,
each one with his hand on his crotch and a chip on his shoulder,
eyes and jaws set hard.
Trains
and bass from the trunks of lowered Mustangs
rumble in the distance
as red warning lights
blink from the smokestacks of the old steel mills,
the too late protest of a drunken party host
begging the guests to stay.
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POP!
12 years ago
2 comments:
A nice, lazy exploration of an underobserved scene. Some of the turned phrases here ("Pottery Barned homes," "the shopkeepers' ghosts, leaning in the doorways of places that used to be," "the too-late protest of a drunken party host...") are easily among the best on this here website.
Aside from detached disappointment, I don't get a theme here -- is that intentional?
Some obnoxious syntax comments:
- I'd make the it "rain-glazed granite" in line two, since you want to make sure it's the granite that's rain-glazed, not rain that's glazed a shade of granite. I also think it's grammatically correct (compound adjective).
- Don't you want a colon, not a semicolon, at the end of stanza three, line one? It's the beginning of a list, and anything after a semicolon should (unartistically) be a complete clause.
- Stanza five - it's "karaoke," not "kareoke," phonics aside.
Thanks. I think the theme really is detatched disappointment. I wrote this after a couple of nights wandering around downtown Birmingham taking snapshots. It's a strange place to walk through at night. Very abandoned. Of course the abandonment is part of what it makes it interesting.
Birmingham's nickname is "The Magic City" because it sprung up so quickly out of nowhere in the early 1900s due to the steel industry. Doesn't feel that magic anymore.
Thanks for the syntax comments. I do appreciate those.
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