Towers loom By Patrick T. Reardon Loop towers loom behind their gleam, and I can take you to the parking lot just off Dearborn Street where the Mayor and reporters went down into unflooded freight tunnels (although that lot is likely gone now, 26 years later). Alex and I drove south to north from city border to city border through alleys of Chicago, world  alley capital. I saw a garage sale chair and came back later to buy. If you walk under the Loop and follow the tracks west down Lake Street — the soldierly tromp of steel frames to oblivion — you follow my brother’s walk as a twelve-year-old through a Sunday summer afternoon (through black  hot neighborhoods where young men and old, grandmothers and skip-ropers saw him as a gray -dungareed shaman, magic blond boy), up back stairs, to the Leamington second floor, 52 years before self-murder. Younger, he and I crawled around the new-poured  foundation of a Washington  Boulevard building, so muddy and our bikes, we had to walk  them home to the double- spanking for the double of us by Dad, on the porch, then after the bath in bed. Up Western from 79th Street, I drove to Chicago (800 north) and turned left, out to the reporter job in Austin.  A right turn, and, in a mile, Ashland, where, thirty  years later, I walked with Sandra the grit Chicago that […]

Coleman Hawkins (1904-1969) By Patrick T. Reardon skeleton ancient network burned out the final sparks of life and music linger on true fire dies hard (he honeys his tenor sax for sweet Jesus) high priests surround the dying saint melodic prayers reverencing the final moments heavenly prayers to earth in rhythmic religion the monster is beyond life melody’s dying thread is out of place with tired nerves and sinews full of awe Patrick T. Reardon 5.28.19 This poem was originally published in Back Door in 1970.

She broke By Patrick T. Reardon She broke my arm when I was a baby. It wasn’t my arm but call it an arm. It mended crooked, at an odd angle, thickened, clotted, stiff instead of supple, a wrinkled butterfly wing, an antelope limp. I could not swing a baseball bat or brush a lover’s hair. I still have the broken arm. My brother’s hurt was worse. He died of it. She tattooed her scripture on my spine, her gospel proclamations on the inside of my skull, her dire psalms on the bottom of my right heel, on the sweep of my right hip, black etched lines, leaking, insinuating. The tree grows out of my chest, another from my forearm, my jaw, my left shin. Syrup tapped, dripped, fermented, sold, re-sold.  A forest where Abel kills, Noah drowns, the Messiah leper never gets the ghost back. Let me open the apartment door of her limping mother in the kitchen, baking bread, breaking bread, the afternoon sun jeweling soil and backyard dung and growing things and creeping things and the newborn and the dying and the dead. Her bread was sprinkled with flour. Two candles under a throat to bless away. […]