America, you’ve laid a cable in my heart
with fifty million channels showing beer and cars
and porn. I watch them all with bored fascination,
a world within a world and yes, I am a part
time businessman learning how to think
in an American accent, out to lardy dinner
before the big game mascot masquerade, a super-
market carnival that’s sponsored by a drink
as difficult as opera to enjoy but fizzier.
In the mini-Apple sky the clouds are bruised purple
by searchlights, Go Vikings! and there’s evidence
of thought
bubbles bursting as they rise above the sober
clink of glasses filled with water and leaking
words
that pass for conversation, here in Hiawatha’s
Hideaway on Nicollet and Thirteenth Streets
with Cindy, Larry, Rich and Sandy, our team of
experts
on digital manipulation, imaging and scanning
(documents, primarily). It’s the end of a long
project, Sandy on fulfillment, Larry, hardware,
Cindy programming and Rich, project planning,
while I just write the cheques and wander through
the warehouse
district every lunchtime down to the chocolate
milkshake
of the Mississippi churning towards St. Paul
and watch as the glacier belt winds arrive and
douse
the flaming leaves of yet another Indian summer.
To the skyways! A floating island docked at
mezzanine
level, a city within a city riddling the heart
of the grid with portholed shopping tubes from
which a number
of minor wonders can be seen: stainless steel
art museums, Minnehaha falls, a giant
spider’s egg about to burst from Hubert Humphrey
Metrodome. I’m keeping my end of the deal;
‘My nape please’, says Cindy as we’re walking home,
meaning: massage it. These people cannot mourn;
our bedroom is a furnace. ‘My nipple is my Naples’,
she cries and rides me steady as a metronome.