Trend (1943)
To Sidewalk Blues [take 3]
Porch, Town (anyday)
to Duke Ellington
Socialites drift outside the Paradise on the west side of Crawford Avenue. Tonight the
headliner opens and the sidewalk performs as mainstage: a blackened juncture of the
Borsalino fedora and millinery hats or scarves and gloves. Street lanterns and the storm
light over the entranceway snare the white strip of the Panama ring around the
gentlemen’s hats. A hundred-or-so Packard Eights outline the city-lot. Here among the
sophisticates class requires the common stuff. Here in the metropolis gather these look-
alikes. Cosmopolitan, a trend-spotter spits to any attire, Indubitably.
By day, the felt and silk decorate the street lanterns and the hoods of the Packard Eights.
A thousand naked sophisticates run home covering their privates. No short-cuts through
alley-ways or back-lanes where vagrants and stray cats squat and piss and sleep. A
marathon of tits and ass, a current of means working the municipal maze as wind:
Indubitably, it huffs. The parade draws down Main Street where the taxi man sits idle and
the sun won’t rise until noon.
A quick flicker of fire
off the messenger wire
and the cars patter around
the Old Levee district.
Above the street
barnstormers sweep
the sky and hedgehop
the hats below.
The Great Western
Railway Depot
schedules its trains on trucks
through Villa Park
and a drifter checks
his watch beside the track.
The distilleries
shake this town: “Lefty”
Koncil and “Dingbat”
O’Berta bopped “Mitters”
Foley over Saltis’ Southwestern
territory, the Heights.
Off Michigan, the city’s line
seethes outward from the wake
off thousands of tonnage
of iron ore, coal, grain,
limestone, and Sears Roebucks
& Co. Kit Houses, a pre-fab
mass to standardize
America. At Victor Records
on the South side in September,
Ferdinand Morton doesn’t brake
but chisels off the stele
a jazz age as obvious
as death and its remains,
the steady laugh
and lamb’s bleat
of “Laughing” Lew Lamar.
Porch, Town (anyday)
to Duke Ellington
Find quiet Porch on Saturday morning when only a nurse and grocer work. Find a
schoolyard or cemetery in Town where nobody’s ready to learn or pay respect this early,
when the dark is dark and the week-end dawn is dead. Proverbs are epitaphs and every
headstone’s the same. The dead live in parlors and barbershops midmornings and
afternoons and everything’s a landmark to the locals and for the strangers a pivot-point.
Appointments are holidays and walk-ins are scheduled, pre-printed on stacks of calendars
free from the church vestibule. Church is mandatory and everyone sings from the missal
or by heart.
Find Porch on Saturday morning a gallery of stormbirds. Presage the storm mistle thrush
and storm finch. Now only you and the grocer look unto the storm-burst horizon as the
nurse’s desk faces east and the wall. The birdcall is a fitful alarm clock and a deaf hound
hides under Porch. Worry about the storm, violent on a sudden, the thunderbird cloud-
head two-canoes of Sioux myth and specter. Sioux women and men prepare their camp.
The grocer tosses last week’s produce; a new crate is due in Tuesday.
A native of St. Louis, Greg Ott currently lives in University City. He has published poems in local journals and magazines, such as Natural Bridge and 52nd City. You can also find some of his verse online at The Cultural Society. He teaches writing and literature at colleges and universities around town and at the prison in Bonne Terre, Missouri.
