The Leveling

by Jim Daniels

The Leveling
Detroit

The unrequited affection for cement
I gashed my knees against it
stumbling into prayer
the perfect flatness, the perfect
squares, the endless, endless
roads and sidewalks.

We covered
our skin against it as we grew
we shrugged our bald tires over it
we squealed our black
celebrations over it
oh the sweet bitter tang
of burnt rubber.

Sight uninterrupted by shaggy
greenery — just brick dust grit
sharp angles upward
from flat roads and straight
streets that led to larger flat
porches swollen
and cracked
by the lack of sinking
the abrupt stop of each step
lack of mercy and give
litany of falls recorded
and erased.

And so we invented
the automobile
the end of all our
fairy tales
the hard pop
of the closed book
the fall into sleep

knowing it was out there
with its steady blank pages
to carry us down prescribed
paths.

And so we came to love
the tar spacers
to mark our progress
the lines of our music staffs
the lines of our loose–leaf
the lines of hymnals
and prison bars
and the staccato thrusts
of our horizontal
production regulated
by clear pale definition.

And so
and so
this is how we lived
almost content
with our inability
to carry those thick heavy
anonymous identification cards.

Sometimes a train in the distance
called out and rumbled
nostalgia for its own direct lines
sometimes above us, contrails
hard against our shaded eyes
dissipated
miraculous
and brief.

And so we scraped our winter cries
against it
uncovered it
so we knew where we were
so we would not leave
footprints.

And so the soundless percussive
piano keys of our streets
and so the unspoken scars
of the unspoken cars
the silent swallowed
economy of emotion.

And so cracks occurred
and so we patched them
crude and obvious.

And so we invented the limitations
of imagination
in the fiction of our repairs.

And when we awoke
was it fantasy or nightmare
as we choked and gasped
as the cement truck poured
it down its chute
and down our throats?