Cities

50 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW GREG KUZMA CITIES Though I was not born in Allentown and Poughkeepsie was never my town and Marshall is too tucked back among bleak hills I think I should like to be a peony in Albuquerque where they are rare according to what friends have told me Belleview has the air of a forgotten place all violets along its shattering brick walks and a mill gradually more and more smeared by ivy girls who walk there are fifteen years older than you would think which is why I was so successful there back in 58 Lincoln is the land of lakes and home of creamery butter but the dairies are so close upon each other you gradually shake off one cow before there is another whole field of these and now with brown faces and not white Minneapolis is surely the Athens of the north but I was never there amidst its season the one they always talk so well of at the bars when something special happens Red Hook for me was always a kind of last ditch stand 51 KUZMA my mother went to school there learning how to be my mother Pug the Kid pug nose who used to beat me up had an uncle dying there of cancer of course Michigan has its cities and I like them all even those stained by their resources or wounded and forever dying. My home town could never have been worse than it was the day I left it always to return older and older until some miracle we wear each other down. Last time I was in Salasie with the concert blooming in the park and the bicycles all leaning over the tingle of the ice cream truck announced some left not driven by despair whose songs they were I must have plainly heard that long day when the crank shaft broke and I lost fifteen dollars playing pool Salasie was the place where someone went to school. In Bishop they have women that you never see have locked themselves away from the tedious world to pursue in closets mircles of restraint and the little rumors of salvation quick on the plate at evening or at the window in the presence of some bird or weather I read a book that told about it. America I love all your places. When I was born my mother dreadfully frightened 52 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW not only of my soggy presence but also of my father and of herself set foot alone across the plains succeeding at last at the fording of the Platte though the water was high that year at Albion saying the name over and over she survived into middle age with most of her marbles. Me, I took off for Benton when the first train came through whose cattle door wide open I could reach to. ...