My Stop is Grand
I have no illusion
some fusion
of force and form
will save me,
bewilderment
of bonelight
ungrave me
as when the El
shooting through a hell
of ratty alleys
where nothing thrives
but soot
and the ratlike lives
that have learned to eat it
screechingly peacocked
a grace of sparks
so far out and above
the fast curve that jostled
and fastened us
into a single shock of—
I will not call it love
but at least some brief
and no doubt illusionary belief
that in one surge of brain
we were all seeing
one thing:
a lone unearned loveliness
struck from an iron pain.
Already it was gone.
Already it was bone,
the gray sky
and the encroaching skyline
pecked so clean
by raptor night
I shuddered at the cold gleam
we hurtled toward
like some insentient herd
plunging underground at Clark
and Division.
And yet all that day
I had a kind of vision
that's never gone completely away
of immense clear-paned towers
and endlessly expendable hours
through which I walked
teeming human streets,
filled with a shine
that was most intimately me
and not mine.
Copyright Credit: Christian Wiman, "My Stop is Grand" from Once in the West. Copyright © 2014 by Christian Wiman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Source: Once in the West (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2014)