Chicagoland
Chicagoland
summers blister under
nails,
winters bite
through bone,
autumn wrenches
out the eyes,
springtime
springtime
springtime brings the
trout back home.
Eli Louis
has a job on
East
Huron Street opening doors
for privileged
guests
in black shoes and red dresses.
Calls himself by his whole name,
says,
“That’s what my heroes did.”
Nat
King
Cole
Pours into the lobby full
of
deaf trout in springtime coats.
Tilts his dusty, black, thrift-store
hat when he holds open doors;
winks if you look him in the
eye, instead of the little
. holes in the cuff of his shirt.
Usually
No
one looks at him at all.
up
The Tourists
look up
up
and the trout
stare right through you.
Jaded by the walls
of glass
kissing God above the sun.
Zora, Zora -
Eli
Louis shouts my name
from across some busy street.
I
am watching skinny girls
take pictures of stilettos
in the light of spring.
Eli Louis
He’s always blowing his horn.
Throwing music into the crowds.
Waiting
Waiting
Waiting for some
kind trout:
A
benevolent
benefactor who
will
pave (his) dreams
with gold
Buckingham
Fountain
is where I
write
about the sun and the
cellphones buzzing in the park as Eli
Louis
asks for change out of an old
saxophone case that can sing the blues for him when he gets tired.
Zora, Zora –
He was out fishing
for a warm lunch when
he
caught the ear of
some mysterious prince who
claims
(our) time has come.
Eli Louis
was offered a record deal
by a stranger on the street
and I told him to take it
that “we all deserve our dreams.”
And so it was he
who inspired me
to submit my
scribbles
to
the Times and the Tribune.
But when they wrote back with checks
Eli Louis wept in his
old, empty, saxophone case
and the Prince
never came back.
To this day I
don’t blame him
for putting me
down
just when the
soup got thicker
and the beds got
softer and
the springtime bloomed in the park.
But I wasn’t
going to
let him take my
life
just as it was
starting up
no matter how
down he was.
Eli Louis
had a nice funeral
for a man who tried to kill
his wife. Or so I heard from
a south side jail cell.
The Times and
Tribune
don’t
write checks anymore
since
my incarceration.
In Chicagoland
summers still blister,
and the winters bite through my bones,
autumn wrenches out my heart,
but in
springtime
springtime
springtime I
leave the trout alone.
Poetic Explanation for Chicagoland
This story has
many elements that I thought might need more explanation. “Chicagoland” is a poem which retells the
story of “The Fisherman and his Wife” in modern day Chicago. The old man and
woman of the fairy tale have been turned into Eli Louis and Zora, two
artistically talented and homeless citizens of The Windy City who are in their
early thirties. In my version, the trout are actually the wealthy who dominate
a famous shopping street called The Magnificent Mile – literally a mile of road
dedicated to capitalism. Eli goes “fishing” for them in the spring when many of
them are tourists, still able to feel awe for the city. He thinks he “catches”
one who says he is a prince (the golden fish), but in the end betrays him.
Eli’s problem is that he keeps waiting for success to happen to him; meanwhile
Zora actively sets out to fulfill her dreams and get off the street and out of
poverty.
The poem is told
through Zora, who is named after Zora Neale Hurston. As such she represents and
references feminist and coming-of-age elements of the book Their Eyes Were
Watching God. Even though she is the
main character, she uses her voice, at first, to talk about Eli Louis, the
street musician and hotel employee who, in the end, cannot accept it when Zora
finds success before him. It’s also significant that in real life Zora Neale
Hurston ended up being alone and buried in an unmarked grave in Florida.
The syllables
and line arrangement are symbolic of the improvisational style of Jazz as well
as “blue notes” which holds a Mecca in Chicago. Blue notes are the sliding
musicality found in Blues and Jazz music, created when African slaves came to
America and had to sing in church. Blue notes were created when the slaves
tried to find the correct note to sing, because the scales of the western
European music and the western African music are different. It was the mixture of these five and seven
note scales that created the foundation of Blues and therefore Jazz, and so
that’s how many syllables the major lines contain. Heading “topics” contain
four syllables.
I wanted to give
a feminist spin to what I saw as a very sexist story. The original story is
only about greed on a very basic level. More so, it is about the “terror” of
women’s ambition and the shame of any “spineless” man who would listen to her.
By incorporating religious images, the old fairy tale adds another element of
destiny and predetermination and “natural order” as well. I wanted to show how
both genders are more alike than they are different, both have the right to
dream, and the right to defend that dream – while also equally capable of
darkness.
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