Location

JULY 1991

MARK HALLIDAY

LOCATION

You could begin by saying "This summer in Philadelphia . . ."

But then you might instantly feel a gush of weariness

and think No, no-something else-not

"this summer", not "Philadelphia"...

The thousands of men in sleeveless shirts

who never bother to disturb your suspicion that

they are all awesomely stupid.

The teenage girls chewing green gum outside pizza joints.

Pavement so crudded yet seeming without history. . ..

Heat clotted on the skin of all the Phillies fans.

Not this.

But what?

Winter? In Chicago?

- You could work that up

and it might have a cleanness of outline:

a crisp wind in off the lake,

great block boulders rimming the lake,

deep blue of that chilled lake so far from here;

hard-edged pedestrians wearing dark scarves;

a sense of tough bold swagger involving

Carl Sandburg, Saul Bellow, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells.

Snow packed solid on the stern roofs

and someone moving bravely through the canyons of

the Loop.

. .. There is that option.

And yet with it the nagging of how it isn't

this, isn't the mess on hand.

Lord let me not write poems whose little events or

non-events

seem to take place in Europe, indeed in some

quaintified Europe

of 1938 or 1928 or 1913, for the sake of naming

European streets and beverages. Let me not do

that, Lord.

I will fail in my ways but not so cheaply as that.

This summer in Philadelphia

people on their front stoops glanced up at a jet

droning toward the airport (one more thing beyond

their control)

and bent down to grasp today's thumb-smudging

Inquirer.