Providence Notebook

Downtown dead trout float like silver dollars
on the river the Narragansett
called Woonasquatucket.
From its clabbery banks the people muddle
into the town Roger Williams
called Providence.

On the late bus drunks ricochet and clutch handrails
or scratch instant lottery tickets
unless they’ve given up on games of chance
and search their pockets for change
or twice-laundered transfer cards
and study the bottoms of Styrofoam. coffee cups
They stare at signs: street signs, neon-beer signs,
one for a political campaign says, we are the change we’ve been waiting for,
another says, JESUS SAVES, with some of the vowels burnt out.
A Tarot reading sign says that Madam Malek is— out.
In any case she wouldn’t be able to decipher
the streets tonight—mapped out
like chemical tracked arms.

Beneath the muddy viaduct
men in tweed suits sip cocktails
discussing evolution—
how it’s brought them to this night—
or the non-existence of God—
how consistently He persists in his non-being—
conspicuously absent tonight from mud puddles,
crowded bars and especially one-night motels
where you can order cheap porn
if you can’t sleep off the spins
or watch a show about a man without a face,
if you cant shake the thought
of bed-bugs and silverfish that live in the mattress.

On Fountain Street a skinny girl
steals magazines from storefronts
and asks passersby if they know where she can find
an eighth of weed or a plastic surgeon.
A hunched woman with a book of saints in her papery hands
shoots a castigating stare. The girl laughs
to see the words—all running from the pages

A boy at the bar methodically peeling the labels
from bottles of Narragansett
says he knows the girl, says she’s a whore.
I didn’t let her blow me. It wasn’t a question really.
An old man in the corner is hands out pamphlets
and preaches about love and happiness
with such conviction that he must have known
neither love nor a happy day.
Next to him a man in flannel rants about Bin Laden
and the failure of the U.S. to really kick some Arab ass.
I’m a conservative, he explains as if that settled it.
Someone else takes objection—Fuck conservative!
I’m a fascist. Mussolini had it right and goes on….
sick from drinking, afraid he’ll miss the last bus
or that the bar floor will rise up to the bar stool
and smack him in the face.

It’s about time to leave and I’m waiting in the café
where a teary-eyed girl is reading Frankenstein
thinking about the monsters we’ve created
and waiting for a boy she ‘s met online—
searching faces, knowing he won’t arrive.
She’s looking right at me now.
I hide my face in TIME magazine
And read about a boy from Nepal
who sat for months beneath a gnarled bodhi tree.
He must have waited so still, so poised.
Was he sad? And did he think we’d all become monsters?

In the town called Providence
a scruff-bearded man
half-recognizes himself
in storefront windows
and tosses a coin in the river
with the other dead fish.