***
John d'Ambrosio, on the warehouses in Chicago:
It [Chicago] was destroying itself, or sloughing off its old industrial self, and many of the brick warehouses and factory buildings in the neighborhood, gutted and windowless, deserted, were no better than caves hollowed from rock, with doors gaping open blackly, home to the homeless, the vast vacant interiors lit only by the light of fires burning in oil drums. In seeking the future a city like Chicago wrecks itself and returns to stone, at least briefly. There were piles of rubble such as you imagine in war, but the absence of declared enemies, and the lethargic unfolding of time, its leisurely pace, kept people from seeing the scale of the shift as catastrophic. Factories and warehouses and hotel, these old muscular hopes came down in heaps of brick and mortar, of pulverized concrete and cracked limestone, and then those cairns of rock, in turn, were cleared off to become barren lots as flat and featureless as the prairie they'd supplanted.***
Today at the market we got a box of peaches. A dozen ears of corn. Asian pears from the Asian pear family. Fingerling potatoes. Romano beans.
And we saw this:
Eurasian Eagle Owl, according to the guy who had him there. |
***
This afternoon, I rested and slept for a quiet hour. As usual, I'm up late. I'm watching Song of the Sea, because my daughter told me it was 'weird and sad but literally the most beautiful animated film' she'd ever seen. I'm thinking about a poem, about islands and causeways, exiles, marauders, hermitages. The day's almost done.
And what a day it was--full of everything lovely.
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