A Stranger Here Myself
Daniel Groves
…that benighted city. –Frank Lloyd Wright “
She’s a brick…(and one and two and)…house.”
Funk follows formstone out of vacant blocks
where row on row of more brick houses drowse
in sprawling shade, as the last carthorse click-clocks
in time toward when, her ships come in, the docks
were bustling—swart, side-burned, the common boors
unloaded wares for Clipper commodores…
Loaded nowheres; the Broadway (too broad, indeed)
of memory, yoking past and present—witty
or cavalier—to fail what we succeed
(hard fact, brick factory in complicity
with dream, our unincorporated city,
Retropolis). Though where but this co-here
could all our incoherencies cohere?
Such as the concrete underneath my feet
and abstraction of the signs above my head
(downtown and up—both are a one-way street,
but parallel), ST. PAUL and CHARLES. Misled,
perhaps, by mere book smarts, too many dead
white males, my do-it-yourselfer projects upon
historic structures, fallen, nearly gone,
the will to restoration— which, of course,
must mean conversion, too, so that the former
fills a function (cart behind the horse).
That old-line statesman, gentlemanly farmer,
Lord Baltimore, could not provide for more
than meets the idling idealist today
of his Jacobite angel-wrestling, on display
through centuries (like Greek Town, Druid Hill;
the masquerading Bromo-Seltzer tower,
Domino’s Sugar; Pig Town, Butcher’s Hill;
boarded-up storefront churches, 24-hour
Rite-Aid; Beth Steel, LaCrosse; a higher power,
up with The Sun clock-punching; rhyme, meter;
Lyric Opera House, Mechanic Theater).
But this is horseplay, hackwork—arm in arm,
these couples make a scene that made out worse
as, from “The Monumental” into “Charm”
city went Baltimore. By some perverse
horror, or pragmatism, Poe and Peirce
died poor, dispersed, as Mencken’s burboisie,
(ever-mercurial) sounded-off Key,
with coltish unitas, unto the local
heavens (blue horseshoe collar, aureole
of looming lights) for Weaver and, lo, Cal
before they took the field at Memorial
away, and picked its carcass clean. Its soul?
Nevermore? The ravings carry on;
no bardic songbird, only carrion,
I join in the lost cause, beat a dead horse,
drink at The Hippo (if not Hippocrene)—
my (equi)vocation, mixing metaphors
for this Metapolis, moving between
READ and CHASE (at EAGER,epicene
epicenter) and backward—significantly?—
since age eighteen, from UNIVERSITY.
My twenties in the Thirties—classic white
marble stoops to conquer, an attic room.
But thirties in the Twenties? Forties—wait,
I-40? The Inner Harbor’s recovered womb?
Through netherhoods of dome and spire, doom
and aspiration, what prestigial
detail remains of our original
old glory, grandeur? Is charm a monument?
The antiquated anti-quaint? The odd
wrought-iron frontispiece on Space for Rent,
the odd wrought-iron star on the façade,
remember, bears a load (but household god
gargoyles’ stone-faced perseverance is
only to keep up disappearances).
Form follows function—will, that is, outlive
its use. Still, fretwork, grating, colored pane
and painted screen, fancy, if useless, give
perspective. Elaborate frames that show their strain
(the crack, the pipes); the imminent domain
of fixer-uppers— junk supplies our fix:
the ton of bric-a-brac, or the ton of bricks.
Will building blocks that, layer on layer (bored,
martyred, mortar-boarded), we pre-cast to spell,
from TIME and LABOR, BALTIMORE, be floored,
dropping, again, to BLAME and RIOT? Well,
one noticed, visiting, in those who dwell
in this De tropolis, “an inverse pride
in not being noticed.” Suicide,
like immortality, would draw too much
attention. The National Bohemian
natty beau fades out, with no retouch,
winking conspiratorially, man-to-man.
Suspenders, dandy moustache, frothy can—
each trademark property, condemned, persists
for fetishists and counterfeitishists,
stung with nostalgia by some buzzword (“Hon”),
by beehive sentimentality, sickly sweet,
glazed over, overdone, over and done, done
over. My baroque-ial school aesthete
keeps the faith, invokes the Absolete,
the cataclysm, the holy trivia quiz
“as it was in the beginning, shall be, is,
without end.” Greek Revival; Drag Queen Anne;
Flamboyant Gothic; Georgian; French Chateau;
Carthorse; Iron Horse; the Iron Man;
cart-blanche; wrought irony; my B & O
roundhouse, where trains of thought, however slow,
are linked-up to a one-track mind to run,
always on time, birth to oblivion,
Golden, Gilded, Gelded Ages hence…
into the turn, the backstretch, comes the night-
mare, my paling dark-horse, with a sense
of show, and place, and loss, to find daylight
across this bay to which I have not quite
been brought up yet (the racing form, the poem,
and I, perfunctorily, follow), head for home.
