Street Art

Ann Arbor, Michigan

July, 2013

 

 

1 .

Painters perch on stools,

ruffled by futile fans

shuffling heat without relief. 

 

Street smells rise like painted faces,

the pleading thirst of sweating leopards

and butterflies that droop. 

 

I should have hung the snow prints,

says an oil painter shunned

for burnt orange and red,

exacerbated desert no one buys today. 

           2.

 

Faces tell me nothing,

narrow blurs on black shoulders,

lean walk, hand in pocket,

open coats loosely flared— 

 

long shadows speak of evening,

city at their back,

heels tap past the wine shop— 

 

separate strangers in the same black suit

tell me I’m no different, scarcely seen

through gestures mirrored by frozen forms

cooled by a gray sky thirty inches wide. 

 

3.

 

I browse the leaf art jewelry,

ask if the earrings change color,

            falling off in November?

 

            because an unnamed face

may ask the wrong questions in peace

when you’ve peeled your name
like summer fruit,

remembering how to slip a bike
               smoothly through traffic. 

   4.

 

Raucous chimes mock the silver street mime,

verdigris comedians clamoring how sound prevails,

how still life cries for movement,

how a living face will not be lost

            in the portrait hall—

 

how patternless chimes

make sounds that still matter— 

 

which is what the silver street mime

            tried to say

                        in silence.

 

5.

 

I wait at the base of the carillon tower

for hundred year bells to sound the hour

when tents will drop a magician’s cloth

on vanishing art.

 

The city will quiet

with the painted people gone,

as if colors had never been there,

 

as if long shadows of the emptying crowd

weren’t painting themselves

to the street.