Featured Poem 1/13 – “The Minneapolis Poem”

The Minneapolis Poem by James Wright

to John Logan

1

I wonder how many old men last winter

Hungry and frightened by namelessness prowled

The Mississippi shore

Lashed blind by the wind, dreaming

Of suicide in the river.

The police remove their cadavers by daybreak

And turn them in somewhere.

Where?

How does the city keep lists of its fathers

Who have no names?

By Nicollet Island I gaze down at the dark water

So beautifully slow.

And I wish my brothers good luck

And a warm grave.

 

   2

The Chippewa young men

Stab one another shrieking

Jesus Christ.

Split-lipped homosexuals limp in terror of assault.

High school backfields search under benches

Near the Post Office. Their faces are the rich

Raw bacon without eyes.

The Walker Art Center crowd stare

At the Guthrie Theater.

 

   3

Tall Negro girls from Chicago

Listen to light songs.

They know when the supposed patron

Is a plainclothesman.

A cop’s palm

Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs

Of a light bulb.

The soul of a cop’s eyes

Is an eternity of Sunday daybreak in the suburbs

Of Juárez, Mexico.

 

   4

The legless beggars are gone, carried away

By white birds.

The Artificial Limbs Exchange is gutted

And sown with lime.

The whalebone crutches and hand-me-down trusses

Huddle together dreaming in a desolation

Of dry groins.

I think of poor men astonished to waken

Exposed in broad daylight by the blade

Of a strange plough.

 

   5

All over the walls of comb cells

Automobiles perfumed and blindered

Consent with a mutter of high good humor

To take their two naps a day.

Without sound windows glide back

Into dusk.

The sockets of a thousand blind bee graves tier upon tier

Tower not quite toppling.

There are men in this city who labor dawn after dawn

To sell me my death.

 

   6

But I could not bear

To allow my poor brother my body to die

In Minneapolis.

The old man Walt Whitman our countryman

Is now in America our country

Dead.

But he was not buried in Minneapolis

At least.

And no more may I be

Please God.

 

   7

I want to be lifted up

By some great white bird unknown to the police,

And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden

Modest and golden as one last corn grain,

Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives

Of the unnamed poor.