Time with Stevie Wonder in It

Winter, the empty air, outside

cold shaking its rigid tongue

announcing itself like something stone,

spit out, which is still a story

and a voice to be embraced.

Januaried movements but I hear a tune

carries me home to Lansing.

Always waiting for signs of thaw,

dark nomads getting covered by snow,

our parents would group in the long night—

tune frequencies to the Black stations

blasting out of Memphis, Nashville,

still playing what was played down south—

Ray Charles, Charles Brown, Ruth Brown, Muddy and Wolf.

The tribal families driven north

to neighborhoods stacked like boxes—

to work the auto plants was progress,

to pour steel would buy a car

to drive hope further on down the road.

How could you touch, hear

or be alive; how could anybody

wearing our habits, quiet Protestant

heads aimed up to some future?

This was our rule following—

buy at J.C. Penney and Woolworth’s,

work at Diamond Reo, Oldsmobile, Fisher Body.

On Fridays drink, dance, and try to forget

the perverse comfort of huddling in

what was done to survive (the buffering,

the forgetting). How could we not

“turn the head/pretend not to see?”

This is what we saw: hope screwed

to steel flesh, this was machine city

and the wind through it—neutral

to an extent, private, and above all

perfectly European language

in which we could not touch, hear

or be alive. How could anybody

be singing “Fingertips?” Little Stevie

Wonder on my crystal, 1963.

Blind boy comes to go to school,

the air waves politely segregated

*

If this were just a poem

there would be a timelessness—

the punchclock Midwest would go on

ticking, the intervals between ticks

metaphor for the gap in our lives

and in that language which would not

carry itself beyond indifferent

consequences. The beauty of the word,

though, is the difference between language

and the telling made through use.

Dance Motown on his lip, he lays

these radio tracks across the synapse

of snow. The crystals show

a future happening with you in it.