Down Van Buren, flash past bums, mounds 
under shirts, vests, coats hunkered into what 
heat they can win between brick and sidewalk.

Blow through the doorways of Union Station
in a flood , teeming, over-ridden, borne along. Heels,
soles click across marble flooring. Intent, intent.

Hit Westbound Track 11, oil-smeared, black with grit.
A place locked into nothing but the coming and the 
going. Left abysmal, unnoticed as a coroner’s fingernails.

Twenty coaches glisten. Streamlined, every one.
Bustle in and put the bum down onto leather 
padded with fiber, horsehair, exhaustion.

When with a wrench and screech the thing pulls out,
pigeons dart from rafters into a light so powerful it
squints the eyes that slowly readjust and focus onto

broad lots of rubble and tawny weeds, apartment backs
where stairwells Z, sun blistered. warped, snow dusted. 
Feral cats. The occasional smoker restless and numb.

Miles and miles of brickwork and steel where whiskey
glass goes shelf to hand to mouth, shatters across
pavement. Gets shuffled to gutter beside old Trib print.

After Brookfield there’s a shift. Swept streets, shops 
in rows, each with their key and determination. Fluorescent
light weak with hope and worry and forbearance.

Suddenly trees erupt along the way, copses rip by. Yards.
Yards roll. Now you come upon the snow-bent boughs 
of Morton Arboretum. A sanctuary set aside, deeded by 

that famous salt baron in the twenties. Gem overflowing
with oak, maple, hickory, spruce. Designed to be green 
in every season. Hushed hillsides safe as old money.

Our town had a hand pump in the park by the dam.
Big red handle, with piping cemented in 
by the W.P.A. back when legions of men knew 
how to work side by side for common good.  
It was good to ride our Shwinns there, pump 
the heavy handle, cup hands, catch 
a sudden flow, cavernous cold.

My granddad built our house in 1921.
Men who worked with him in the Tribune’s 				
print rooms would ride the train out 
on the weekends. The family itself 
spent that summer in a canvas tent.
Guys with shovels dug eight feet  
to make the basement. Raised, squared 
a frame more true than these things  
builders clap together now.
Mom, her sister and their mother
cooked all day to feed the men. 

Mom always said the original, abandoned well 
out behind our line of apple trees  
had been covered with beams, boards and sod 
but a neighbor’s horse broke through years later,
had its shin snapped into pieces.  
To dig that first well her mother stood up top 
with a rope tied around her scrawny waist 
as granddad dug, tethered to her.  
He’d fill a bucket. Shake a second rope.  
She’d  haul up. Dump. Send back.  

The idea was, if the well gushed in 
she’d tug him up as he clawed at ladder rungs 
and at the sides of a hole three times his height.
Avoid drowning while they worked to find
an unseen source that could sustain them.