Magic Roadster: East Liverpool

Behind the wheel of the magic roadster
Razor’s edge inside my eyes
Driving
As usual, timing’s everything.
Takes on its shivering space
Feeling all over me. The real
Gets realer more real realest, really.
Falters falls dissolves.
I had no defense against the chickens.


Beginning to simmer and roil at stopping
When I had somewhere to go somewhere to be,
In the periphery of my sight,
Behind the split rail fence,
Rusty and chickeny, chickenest, chickenly,
The three of them, abrupt and erratic
As chickens are. On the green grass
On the grey day.
The roadster waited. I waited.
The day continued.


We wheeled into the ghost town around ten
For a meeting. Parked at the beheaded meter
In front of the abandoned gift shop the abandoned florist.
Clipping briskly along, into the end door, pointed to the stairs.
The heavy door opened and closed behind me.
It was my grandma’s house, the smell of her house,
And the steep stairs from her bedrooms, down.
Down carefully, around, past the huge vault door, a room.


Thick marble walls, dark wood, and hormones.
Voluptuous women; pregnant, nursing women.
Women smiling, eating cookies, talking,
In a basement room of an old bank in the ghost town,
Palpable with life, living, liveliness.
I live through it.


An OPEN sign on the ceramic museum across the street
Afterwards. Snapshots: click, crossing the street; click,
In the door; click, hello. “Watch the movie first,
I’ll turn off the air if you’re too cold.”
Alone with a history of the kilns rendered in pen sketches,
Blurred photos, someone’s memories and voice.
A river. Smoke. Horses racing to a fire. Vases bowls cups plates.
"Mind the mannequins downstairs," he reminds. Rightly. They startle.


Descending, in the humid air, past
Waxed workers in an early factory diorama assembly line.
A mirror at one end reflecting more of them
Into a long line of potters potting industriously.
A hundred year revolution, evolution of a town from
Wilderness to technology to dearth.
A couple of girls
Smoking cigarettes walk across the empty street outside.
I get back into the magic roadster for the ride home.
Timing's everything.