Poem of the Week: "Blue Mound to 161" by Garin Cycholl
Garin Cycholl teaches writing and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he also works as co-editor of Near South, a journal of experimental poetry, fiction, and drama. His recent work will appear this spring with Admit2 and Keep Going. He is author of Nightbirds (moria books 2006), and Blue Mound to 161, a book-length poem on geological and historical displacements in Southern Illinois (Pavement Saw Press 2005).
from Blue Mound to 161
into the south of it
Illinois
how from any road, Geff
seemed south to me
Wayne City, too
not the crux or
"at the center" but
on this side
on that side
not even "border states"
then but roomfuls of voices
debating secession in
Union and Alexander
downstate counties Federal
guns already come down from
Chicago to hold the
rivers at Cairo
or trucks
crossing the bridge there
Corollas running I-24 into
Kentucky Cadillacs flying
I-57 north coal barges
slipping locks, dodging
catfishermen tanker cars
of acids passing through
the East St. Louis yards
these things' momentum
staggering
these girls
singing in place their
songs testing the memory
in rocks
in sedges
in seeds
in the reptile itself
as the song says,looking
at my own bad
attitude toward the
pastoral the here-
ness of it ground
measured out in
spoil heaps and
the world begins
in a ditch – light, air,
aluminum, water –
no quack grasses, these
yellowfruit sedge, cuplike
and sick-brown, blooms
hidden, nerves running
the convex face "The only
station in Southern Illinois
for this grass is a wet ditch
near the junction of Illinois
highways 3 and 144."
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