By J.J. Tindall
ODE TO A HOOVER BAGLESS CYCLONIC ACTION QUIK-BROOM WITH ON-BOARD TOOLS
I and I: machine.
Quiet machine, soft machine,
I machine.
Quiet machine:
a mongrel corpus
of wills.
Every street light up Pulaski
for forty blocks
is lit!
The grid breathes.
But you have to
breathe!
You have to breathe.
Cyclones in
bottles,
one by one,
a corridor of white
fire
vanishing
gamely into the blue-black
horizon.
Steel brick and
mortar channel the changeling
gust,
the soft, spring
southerly Gulf gust: it comes
from the Gulf!
Tear duct
of Quetzlcoatl! Blue ruby
of Ra!
Yeah: for the most part,
a lot quieter now,
if you
factor in
the Dynamo
Hum.
Ah! The HUM.
It burnishes the gust.
Dynamos wreaking
havoc only sometimes
its benevolent havoc, it
works out.
The paid stay
paid, the rich stay
rich
so the machine
is that much more efficient
and way, way
quieter.
I and I gorge
on materiel!
I and I swoon
in the burnished breeze!
That’s machine,
too, don’t
forget (what if you could finally NOT
FORGET?!).
Surely machine,
too, that swoon were
I and I
to testify.
–
J. J. Tindall is the Beachwood’s poet-in-residence. He can reached at jjtindall@yahoo.com. Chicagoetry is an exclusive Beachwood collection-in-progress.
Posted on May 19, 2009