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Robinson's
Hometown
has nothing to do with Dante. You say
it with an accent: you say it Be-at-trice.
A
dirt road lined with leafless trees.
Smokestacks. Some background.
A
slight white kid in white kid shoes
& a dress with ruffles & three pearl
buttons.
Structures skidded against
the flat flat plains, all rising vertical
sightlines
man-grown or man-made.
The corn bursting. The First Presbyterian
Church.
The Institution for Feeble-
Minded Youth. The football games
&
the Buffalo Bill Street Parade
& Robinson acting in elementary
school
plays: Sir Lancelot once,
& Pinocchio, obviously. A little man.
Robinson
reading on the family porch.
Torchsongs wafting from the nighttime
radio
– AM broadcasts lofting
like ghosts from real cities. This
&
his mother's artful research – her side
is descended from the Plantagenets,
maybe
signed the Magna Carta – &
his suffragette Aunt Clara giving him
a
French dictionary for high school
graduation chart it out for Robinson:
most
of the world is not in Nebraska.
Robinson lacks patience for too much
prelude,
rude though it is to be so
fidgety, ungrateful. This hateful small.
This
hateful empty. Civic & dutiful.
Not not beautiful. These moldered.
These
elderly. Soon-to-be outgrown.
He simply must. Or bust. A loner
ill-suited
to being alone. In a double-
breasted suit. En route to elsewhere.
Robinson
Walks Museum Mile
the ideal city building itself in his brain.
Is this mile magnificent? He's lived here
a
while, but the mile feels unreal. Robinson's
training himself to act blasé. Do museums
amuse
him? Yes, but not today. Would he
like to be in one? Of course. Why not?
An
object of value with canvas wings,
an unchanging face in a gilt frame, arranged –
thoughtless,
guilt-free, & preserved
for eternity. Robinson doesn't want to be
exceptional.
He knows he is. He wants to be
perceived exceptional. Trains plunge by, steam
rising
from the grates. Sing, muse! of a man
ill-met at the Met. A man on his lunch break,
heading
for a heartbreak, a break-up with Time.
A break-up with time? Feeling filled with ice,
the
way you chill a glass, Robinson passes
the National Academy. He craves a sense
of
belonging, not to always be longing. To be
standing in a doorway, incredibly kissable,
not
waiting at the four-way, eminently missable.
Is this mile magnanimous? He wants it
unanimous:
that this is his kind of town –
up & down & including Brooklyn. The sky
is
clearing, but the isolation sticks.
Robinson's not sure what a camera obscura
is
for, but he thinks he should have
his portrait done with one. Faces
blur
by as he heads toward the Frick.
Something used to photograph the obscure.
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