This Carting Life. Rustum Kozain

anger.

      At the stop on 95th, black faces

      in the street focus for a second on me

      as sunlight breaches the tinted glass.

      We recognise each other. Here at last

      are many who see me

      not as foreigner or curio

      but one of them, on a lonely trip.

      The bus leaves. The day kites

      like freshly ironed cotton

      though Chicago’s skyline fades

      as designs fade on Chinese T-shirts

      sold on Cape Town’s tourist squares.

      Here, the united colours of America

      dull, and become Southside charcoal

      smeared through trees brittle

      as ornamental coral; trees that strain

      at minnows trailing thread-like turds,

      jetting high above. Yellow-and-black

      school buses wallow, flounder

      like lost, bloated tiger fish

      caught in winter’s dun grass.

      Vacant used-auto lots span

      their obligatory rainbows

      taut in gunmetal-old oil patches …

      The bus whales through the mind’s currents

      veers due south, takes the Skyway

      and exits from acres of cracked billboards.

      I’ve been here not so long

      but long enough to know

      how coal-heavy barges slowly sink

      in blanched green canals;

      how Gary, Indiana festers:

      a boil of smokestacks, air ducts

      thick knots of pipe and cable

      dark as vein and muscle

      where the earth ruptures

      as disease confronts itself.

      But men still fish here, from dams

      dug jig-saw snug against each other

      and reflecting the white pustules

      of nearby chemical tanks.

      Beyond lie four lone stone arches

      crumbling: a low bridge

      that once carried trains

      over this drained swamp

      lies now in ruins

      in a huddle of young decay.