Nine of Clubs, Cleveland, Ohio

Thursday night: Progressive

Friday and Saturday nights: Eurostyle

Now I know there are bored, beautiful people everywhere.

The boys on their long stems of bones

waft and mingle, sipping Campari,

saying next to nothing to the girls.

Ecstasy is draining. So is awe, anger, dread, tenderness

when frustrated by convention-any number of emotions

we will not see here tonight

though we stand equidistant from dancefloor

and Lake Erie, gone back to solution this late March

the way a bruise leaves a body.

All night the ice loosens and grinds toward Canada.

We feel it more than hear,

and ore boats steer darkly

into the issuance of their lights, their names, as we did

not one hour ago, supplicate in the doorway's

jittery neon. We paid eight dollars to enter

what is spare, cool, clean.

We left behind fish stink and diesel fuel.

But what Europe is this?

If frozen, then cut away

for the purpose of technical diagrams, these dancers

would give no clues. Their faces like the music

are whiter than pain or distraction;

their arms, stopped,

dovetail back as if

beneath black turtlenecks a cavity waited, red and humming,

for larval wings to fold twice, then reenter.

I think this is the end of immigration.

I think if a live pig were thrown

skating and shitting onto the gorgeous dancefloor,

no one would stop drinking or crouch down,

knife between his teeth,

and stroking the smooth parquet

croon hunger, hunger, hunger

in his blood's first language.

The suburbs have given back their angels.

Refineries rise then sink like wedding cakes

into the filthy river, we've seen it often enough,

and it is wrong-headed or lachrymose

to wish the old world back as well,

with its babushkas and lamentations, prayer cloth,

boats fashioned from garlic cloves

by which we washed up on these shores. And the scythe

whistling at its uppermost arc-

"Di Provenza il mare, il suol."

The shining field,

all the ugly babies in the architecture

puffing their thousand-year cheeks at us: I think

it wasn't ours, the past, and now

will never be, who left for better footing,

this purchase on brighter, quicker ground.

No tourist is ever innocent. Tonight

the music churns from hip to hip. The strobe light

won't make up its mind, but flickering hi-speed

erases half of all we see.

It's almost fun, this dancing. And later

if the foreheads of the warehouses loom down

like character actors whose names

we're forever forgetting, say Ma Joad or the Little Rascals'

truant officer, that's okay. We're lucky:

our car is right where we left it.

We're tired, sure. A little drunk. The windshield weeps

in a circle of streetlamp light and fog,

but we can drive all night if we want, lose the Lake

lolling between these buildings like a coated tongue,

head south to Akron or Columbus or Xenia,

anywhere people routinely rise

from the absence of themselves and begin the day new.

As we will here tonight in the tiny bathroom

crowded with our tribe and generation,

and lovely, unhurried, bow

to mirrors, the glimpse of smoky, downturned faces-

you, me, in ritual greeting to our neatly razored lines.