Poetry, Week 46: Joe Hall
Directions to E’s Apartment on Fillmore
The white blue white-blue snow whips
the snow of Buffalo, the snow of this planet
the city quakes, all us people quake
on fire like people set fires on Bailey
against interlocked cults of state violence and theft against
the huge ruminating mouth, throat of quarried rock
J watched the panels of muscle striated with fat
wash by on the metro, rubbed himself naked with olive oil
before plunging into the fryer, and snow, softened
bricks on the shore, all our debt, pleas, and prayers left
naked on the shore, as if the ragged cartilage
of this knuckle could be made new, melted, purified,
abstracted from pain, like snow like snow
snow snow snow and snow
Directions to the Rite-Aid on Grant
The snow hardens to muscle, ice, through diagonals of
snow, the city rises on a shard of land just above the horizon
roads, the broken skyway dangling from
its ragged flank, fiber optic cables, sewage
water lines’ mouths dribbling into the air
torn open census tracts flickering like light bulbs die
the city hovering like a great rootball waiting
to be swaddled into burlap by cops and a poet-capitalist
while the Niagara and Lake Erie spill and mix with snow in the cavity in its shadow
and I am waiting, for the bus, still, to carry me across this town
sheathed in ice glimmering in the wind
two degrees and walking to school, while on Greenwood C sits
with a seed catalog, one ear turned toward the emergency line
while J drives a borrowed car home from Erie County Medical Center
after a slow translating shift, R settles into a computer lab chair
after hustling between gurneys to click through pane after pane of punishing light
to keep her job, to keep unlocked the warm flow of life to herself, her loves
the city rises higher, the snow blows
the ice grows thicker, A backs up and cums all over the tiles
G closes their eyes, laughs, the city rises higher into vortices
of snow, while strays huddle under skids, below decking
and against foundation stones, a stray steps into a suitcase on
C’s porch, or crawls under the still warm clench of
an engine block in the thinning oxygen and frozen footsteps
of Buffalo, milk, urine, and the wellsprings of change
just below the mobile of satellites and stenographers in
eternal transit, below the fine multi-stranded mesh
of information, the rhythm of someone folding, snow
a billowing sheet, snow, corner to corner in the folding
until it is tidy but complex, enrapturing
Directions to the Bus Shelter on Main
And you climb the slush pile the plough tossed
across the curb cut in the deep vacuum of space
in the pale and lightless canvas
the boot-pocked slush mound like mist or silver
shooting icy veins, the angels of Buffalo
the zeroes of a criminal law, from milky cells spread
their bony pinions at some crosswalk within
a larger wing, the great horrible wing
the infinitely unfurling pale wing
that is not shoveling out the bus shelter
or watching kids at the boundaries of their games
or stealing an extra egg to slide sunny-side up onto the plate
of the only person who stumbled into Amy’s through
curtains of snow before taking off your apron
to bullshit with a server
Photo credit: Patrick Cray
Buffalo-based writer Joe Hall’s six books of poetry include Fugue & Strike (Black Ocean 2023) and Buffalo People Finder (Cloak 2024). Current Affairs on Fugue & Strike: “a remarkable poetic project, unlike anything else in literature today.” His essay “PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde” can be found at Community Mausoleum.