POETRY BY KATE SONTAG
LEAVING CHICAGO
Such perfect timing comes
rarely,
in this case is as accidental as a series
of wrong turns heading out of the city
doing last-minute shopping for specialty items
Pick'n Save doesn't carry: fresh mozzerella,
oil cured olives, crusty sourdough.
Adrift in neighborhoods where signs
in Spanish reconfiguring into signs in Polish
exile and beguile us, we feel temporarily
urban again, reluctant to return
to county-road-nowhere too soon.
All weekend in flower beds all over Chicago
the first green inches of daffodils up
a kind of happiness that surprises us
like dolphins leaping in unison at the oceanarium,
pregnant sea-horses and leafy sea-dragons
lit up in tanks in a dark room of the aquarium,
homeless men on Michigan Avenue
singing to us, holding up copies of Streetwise:
"Hey, Mr. Handsome
here's a little ditty
for you and Mrs. Pretty
in her stylish black suede shoes...."
So we choose the long way
home,
avoiding the usual interstate by taking
a northern route along the lake to Sheboygan.
That we end up in historic Cedarburg
by mistake and lose each other in a maze
of gift shops once a brewery seems serendipitous
as our reunion in a smokehouse whose hickory
and applewood perfumes our clothes
as we drive through the Kettle Morraine,
pass a buffalo and elk farm then shift
into reverse. Just before sunset,
stepping outside again with field glasses
you keep in the glove compartment,
I'm still wearing my stylish shoes, already
muddied from snowmelt, unprepared
for these sudden flocks of geese, a pair of sandhills,
and the bald eagle flying over our house
the moment we pull into our lane.
The law of averages does not favor
such synchronicity, but when you hand me
the binoculars I'm convinced
it isn't a vulture after all, tunnel back
to the woman crying in our hotel room
earlier that morning and the man
staring blankly out the window, see
how determined they were without realizing it,
to get us where we are now, looking up
from our own rutted way, identifying
the large white head, the level wings, the unlikely
possibility of such a homecoming.
A previous contributor to BMR, Kate Sontag has been published in
numerous journals and anthologies, including Boomer Girls (U.
of Iowa Press),
Prairie Schooner, Green Mountains Review, Salt Hill Journal, Kalliope,
Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod, "The Chester H. Jones National
Winners Anthology,"
and she has work forthcoming in In Praise Of Pedagogy (Calendar
Islands Publishers).
She was the receipient of the 1995 Ron Bayes Poetry Prize and
teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.
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