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
abraded her out to the
southwest and Mexico and
back southwest again, talking
of the dust on medical
implements in the drug store
window, dowdy Rexall, and,
a decade later, my son and
his wife live there in a duplex
with two fireplaces and never
saw the Rexall, gone now.
They can walk to work in
the Loop in looming towers.
Patrick T. Reardon
7.24.19
The poem was originally published on 6.13.19 by The Esthetic Apostle.
Written by : Patrick T. Reardon
For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.