Poetry by Eleanour Berry

Clybourn and 35th

Summer days, heat roils the air
over the asphalt, only in the small hours a lull
in the din—angry voices, blare of AM rock,
cars, semis, braking, accelerating.
Irish railroad workers built
the turn-of-the-century houses lining this block
of West Clybourn.

                         Two blocks north,
automobile dealerships ring the intersection.
Pavement covers the earth; garish machines
drive everywhere over it.

                                    Two blocks south,
look from the viaduct—the sun
sets over the railyards; trains gather,
great beasts homing,
beneath the copper light.

In the Sun beside the Shade

A young woman, wearing a bright sundress, its hem lightly brushing her bare legs, strolls slowly through Queen’s Park, pushing a baby carriage with squeaking wheels. She pushes it off the paved path and up a small slope, parks it in the shade. Close up, the even cover of grass resolves into irregular patches. She shakes out a big gray blanket, letting the strong breeze billow it, and spreads it in the sun beside the shade where she has parked the baby carriage. But no sooner has she spread and carefully smoothed it than she takes it up and shakes it out again, this time struggling against the strong breeze. Then she spreads it perpendicular to the direction in which she first laid it, perhaps so that her head will be higher than her feet on the slight incline or so that a stone embedded in the ground will not poke into her back. After she has smoothed it out again, she takes off her sandals, raising each foot in turn to unbuckle the straps. First one sandal, then the other, falls to the ground with a soft thud and a light jingle of buckle. Barefoot now, she steps onto the rough wool and walks across it onto the grass, feeling unseen twigs and bald patches of packed, damp mud, cool in the shade. She walks the few steps toward the baby carriage, releases its brake with her foot, holds it from rolling, finally pushes it further up the slope, where it will be closer to her as she lies on the blanket in its new position.

No One Acquiesces

All night and all the next day the snow falls. The wind increases. The air is filled with fine, driven snow. It is still snowing, and the wind is strong and gusty, at dusk. From the bus windows, streetlights and traffic lights are globular, hazy glows strung up the hill, where diffuse, paired headlights waver down. The cross traffic casts moving cones of light, striped diagonally with shadows of swift particles. By the next noon, eleven and a half inches of snow had fallen. The wind has piled up three-foot drifts. In the backyard the drifts are terraced, with curved contours. Lying in your bath, you hear the scrape of shovels reaching concrete, the struggling motors of overtaxed snow-blowers. Everywhere people are shoveling. They heap high, blocky mounds of gleaming snow on either side of walks and driveways. They go in and make cocoa. Then back to the shoveling. Where it has drifted, the snow is dense, wind-packed. There is no place to throw it—each heavy shovel must be carried to a spot the wind has swept bare. You marvel that no one acquiesces—in the face of this blizzard, people do not fold into themselves, letting the snow surround their houses, build up against their doors. By the second night, along street after street, porch lights and window lamps shine out on high banks of snow, hedging tidily cleared steps and walks and drives.

At Opposite Poles

Spare as a nun’s, the few
pieces that furnish
these large, high-ceilinged
old rooms with fine woodwork.
Floors left bare, space open,
the lake breeze and the light
sweeping in through tall windows.

~

Every surface covered, texture
upon texture—this small apartment a dazzle
of pattern and picture. Every nook a trove
of utensils and ornaments, holding
their histories of touch. Every window filled
with ferns, succulents, cacti—intricate green
shielding from cold panes and the snow outside.

~

At opposite poles, but each
its own sort of paradise.

Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash.