Copia (5 page)

T
HE
A
RCHITECTURE OF
M
EMORY

Dear yellow backhoe, dear yellow grader, dear yellow bulldozer:

you decipher and dismember our dirt, clay red from iron oxide,

topsoil stripped by development. How did anyone bury their dead

here, when no spot yields to a shovel? Down the block

I've seen tiny walled-off clusters of headstones for families who sold

their farmland to make our tract homes, but it's like chipping away

at stone to get past the first façade of our yard which cracks like

earthquake cement, holds water like a sealed basin. My son

loves to curl his hands into half moons and press them together

as a bowl, flatten them to a book. I've been reading the
sefer zikoren
,

the
yizker-bikher
that recount how survivors like my grandmother

searched their hometowns in vain after the war for familiar bones

to bury, and then for their peacetime dead, only to find the streets

paved with Hebrew inscriptions, gravestones face-up. Avenging ghosts.

Maybe you're already there, grandmother, bulldozer. Rendered.

Surfaced with asphalt. The iron gate to the entrance where the cemetery

once stood.

Each morning in the car my son yells,
Detour!
, reminds me we're taking

the new way since the road is broken. Orange yield sign, orange cone,

exhumed coffin of the soon-to-be playground, the promised pool;

heaps of gravel grow and vanish in minutes, and O the brick piles,

the retaining walls that fit (dip-click) into each other. I will crochet

my son an afghan of a dump truck, of a backhoe, of a crane

like the one we stopped to watch this week outside school

raising large metal pipes high above the stadium. We held hands

and looked past the chain-link fence papered in green mesh

like a present, past the see-saw and drying sandbox. Dear

bulldozer, dear grandmother, we are placeless. We are placeful

but unrooted. We are boomburbs and copia. We are excavated

and hoisted. We are rubble. We are

all new and renovated, and when we go in that rapture

the neighbor preaches on each Sunday (rupture past memory perished)

there will be no ashes. We will be caught up together above

alleyways stoops fire-escapes storefronts—all the things

we don't have in our subdivision, all the things that shined

in your Bronx, from the window of the Grand Concourse apartment—

and before the traffic and rooftops crumble we will ascend in clouds

of dirt and steel and smoke that spell out warnings: Do not stay here long.

Leave as quickly as you can once you have fulfilled the mitzvah,

as it is written:      obligation : locate      obligation : procreate.

Dear grandmother, these are for the most part words not gravestones,

gravestones not books to ward off the melancholy of dusk, a paper cemetery

sited next to an arterial cluster of what? To carry out the commandment

to remember and remember and then bury it.

L
ET THE FUTURE BEGIN THIS WAY:

a house goes up & says Amen

then falls down

which means whole neighborhoods

fade away like that,

with one holy blessing

in the distressed light

ground to gravel,

sputtering engines

of grit & shingle

& shunned dust.

Dust!

The blind angel

of Detroit: head

like a bullet, dollar sign

for a heart. Time was

when even the Bronx

put cheery faces

on crumbling façades:

bright plastic decals

with shutters, curtains,

flowerpots, and even

occupants—what could it hurt?

The old neighborhood was verdant

but not magical, bombed out

but not foolhardy;

go by, and even

thirty years later

the same neighbor

still sits on the stoop.

Let that gutted truth

carry our bodies safe

[between the railway lines] safe

to the shores

of prosperity

where American ruins

stand for failure,

drag us down: things

used to be better;

now, someone

in every city

is guilty

of anonymous assemblages—

heaps of discarded

objects to help us

unforget neighbors

who should have faded

(I watched you disappear

once)

How long? Not long—

How long? Not long—

I feel deeply

that this comfortable existence

How long?

Not long—

is transitory—

that my real home is

How long?

Not long—

in some form

of ghetto,

for whosoever shall call

upon crumbling façades

shall be saved

(from what?)

though the little world

between the railway lines

. . .

has (long) been swept away

How long?

Not long—

Bleak beauty, good friend

gone blind, can't you see

the neighborhood

smashed to brick dust?

How beautiful

are the feet

of those who bring

good news of good things.

M
APLE
R
IDGE

It is nearly Halloween, which means

wrong sizes on Walmart racks, variety bags of

children from the trailer park trawling our identical lawns soon

so we can give away nickels, light, sandpaper, raisins, cement.

But the wind comes first and takes the neighbor's

The wind comes and peels the neighbor's shingles,

The wind comes and

trauma and muscle cars.

The wind comes as a small sacrifice

Their innards will burn.

It is nearly Halloween and we've hollowed

but we can't do anything about the last

We can count on the neighbor's cigarette,

and children flock to our street, sweet things.

III

T
HE
B
OOK OF
D
ISSOLUTION

Because it is an uninhabited place, because it

makes me hollow, I pried open the pages of

Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories

absorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-

oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.

Vines knock and enter through shattered drop-

ceilings, glassless windows. Ragwort cracks the

street's asphalt to unsolvable puzzles. What lives

upon its own substance and dies when it devours

itself? The question shrinks and sticks between

my ribs with toughness. The plaster flowers I

collect in my pocket don't travel well, crumble

to dust. Even the rigid balustrades splinter and

cave in. What shall come to pass? Chaos of

lathe and plaster, baseboards and mold. The

wood that framed rooms is bulldozed is cited is

picked clean is abandoned is a prairie where a

neighborhood once stood. Fire is a force for good

in this place; the later it is put out the better;

there will always be something left over. Trees

grow thirty feet up through a gaping hole left by

skylights collapsed in the heat of flames. Burn

scars on cement where scrappers torched the

last bits of plastic off copper wire spell out code

that reveals what the world will look like when

we're gone. I have been unoccupied I have been

foreclosed I have been vacant for a long time.

Everything of any real value has been looted:

my pulse, my breath, my hereafter. The most

intimate place of all in this city of sadness is the

distance between sounds: testifying pheasants

and wild dogs, amens of saws, amens of

sledgehammers. I am a house waiting to fall in on

itself or burn while a homeless man walks down

the middle of the street pushing a baby stroller

full of sheet metal ductwork. An enclosure is

the most difficult thing to steal so I'll follow

him and then I'll know where to go from here.

P
OST
-I
NDUSTRIALIZATION

This is the single greatest story of American success:

God Bless Our Customers. Fax & Copy Here. Beer

& Wine & Liquor. Gifts & Perfumes & Lottery & Cell.

Check Cashing & Quick Weaves. I saw signs and wonders,

wonders and signs, but no one lugged me from the rubble

with an outstretched hand. I did not rise from the ashes.

In 1914, Henry Ford offered five dollars a day to the men

who assembled the Model T. And the dead were judged

according to their works. What kind of people

could walk away from something like this?

All of us. We like space, we like cars. A city

in decay releases energy: rebar, sirens, razor-

wire, spray paint, a guy pushing a shopping cart

down 2
^nd
Street with a vacuum cleaner in it. Destroy

what destroys you. Then, from the ruins, Hallelujah.

This is happening all over the country. Detroit as cipher

of decay: mirror mirror. And I saw the dead, small and great,

stand before the city. Their fate was tagged on slabs

of plaster with Krylon. And the devil that deceived them

was cast into the lake of fire. And the books were opened.

And the books were burned.
What must I do to be saved?

Photograph the bricks peeling slowly off the rear

of the Wurlitzer Building, threatening an alley

where a squatter hangs one pair of shorts

and one shirt on a makeshift clothesline tied

to a busted fire-escape running along a wall

which has a single red heart painted in every

cracked window. Those Wurlitzer organs

had such lifelike power that they made people

who never sang when they were alone

join in chorus with others. This is where

we start: with great terror,

with miraculous signs and wonders.

B
Y
O
THER
M
EANS

My body as terra nullius. My body as celestial. My body as dysfunctional.

This water-damaged waiting room. This explicable flood of couples with

expectant grins. The grim single-mother with hair past her waist and

plastic Dollar Tree bag as purse. The girl in the hallway asking about my

hair, diamond studs on either side of her lip pinning her smile. This exam

table. This white sheet below my waist. This white sheet reeking of bleach.

Your wisecracking Resident. Your overly-friendly Resident. Your Resident

making me anonymous. Your Resident making me ashamed. I will show

you, Resident, the one corner of Detroit where the houses love me, my sheen,

since I am as cavernous, as broke-down. Where the houses don't talk back or

ask how the procedure went. The vast territory of my ovaries on screen, their

black holes, their stellar mass. The whole solar system is bursting, splintering,

flaring, and I am not. Planets spin on their axes and people are launched into

space. I am the territory no one will inhabit. The borderlands of
motherhood

and
not again
. Want has no business here.

G
HOSTBOX

The first time we went, we forgot

a flashlight. This was outside

Detroit so there was ample

parking. Acres of steel arms

that herded shopping carts in

for pep talks—their rails stood

quiet, parallel, signaling the end

of the diaspora. Never mind

the under-performing automatic

doors. They surrendered first,

hugged themselves shut. We

went back and stood on the roof

of a car to watch the building

smolder. In one account, we

heard gun-shots but didn't

drive off. In another, we met a

coyote, and a red fox when the

sun came up. There was ample

parking. It's worth repeating.

And the distance. The distance

was unrazed, dusted, fenced,

tagged, shuttered. The distance,

most of all, was unlit.

I
N/EXHAUSTIBLE

The billboards into town advertise Southern Gun

& Pawn, Slot Cars, say Everyone's Preapproved!

Best Deal on a Home, Period—the prefabs that come

in halves on the back of trucks labeled WIDE LOAD,

and this was a manufacturing town, until the factories

closed up shop, the warehouses turned to churches

with food pantries, roadways littered with signs:

Are Your Bills Crippling You? Psalm 75:1. Ferguson

Tire: We Buy Gold, then Welcome to Martinsville—

A City Without Limits says the sign on the road in,

and there behind the rows of shotgun houses, a dye plant,

abandoned, two mottled smokestacks rising like goalposts,

no longer pumping out anything of worth near the sign

that says Bankruptcy Could Be Your Solution (All Welcome),

the sign that says We Love You Pastor. Get Well Soon.

The sign says Cash for Old Broken Jewelry, and this

is a town where everyone's broke or gone. It is

Christmastime in Martinsville, and Santa in his red robes,

in his Shriner's hat, stands regal and fat in the darkened

consignment store. Molded sheep rest on cotton batting

near a nest made from hay. The faded wise men kneel

with hands clasped, gazing at that baby with outstretched arms.

In another window, lit-up swaying snowmen share a hymnal,

and the plastic baby rests among doves, nestled by a lady

in blue robes with her head bowed. This is a city

of supplication, of duct-taped and empty storefronts,

of faded holiday ornaments, where downtown businesses

only open three days a week—a city that left its smokestacks

raised in prayer to the signs, and the sign says Highest Prices

Paid in Cash, says HUGE Furniture & Mattress Sale.

Some billboards quote a politician: “Attracting New Jobs”

but the local radio talk show has callers buzzing, all asking

the same question:
when is our train gonna come in when

is our train comin in where is that train
and can you hear it

in the peeling storefronts, the empty storage facilities,

the degree completion joints? The walk-ins welcome,

the spider-webbed glass, the abandoned call centers?

People speak of your wonderful deeds. The plastic families

wear wire halos, and fold their arms to wait and wait.

Someone will bring work. The smokestacks

are out of breath. The sign at Lays It Away

says Happy Thanksgiving to All and God Bless.