in the bowels of powell’s & beyond
I started this morning off writing to friends asking if they went anywhere over the weekend? I am highly interested in other people's expeditions and journeys. Even if it is a mundane trip, say going to work, if it involves traveling into the realm of the unknown, going across a body of water or deep into the earth, anything could happen. For me, I went to Chicago.
Powell's of Portland might be the world's largest used book store, but Powell's of North/Lakeview in Chicago (2850 North Lincoln Ave.) is a mixed bag. Their flier reads: "[We] offer our best selection of Art, Architecture and Photography, and [are] host to our largest rare book room. Lots of fiction, a large children's section and a coffee bar." Be warned; there is a coffee bar which, as the clerk told us, "hasn't been opened in years." There is even a poetry section but it isn't labeled and I wandered around the store twice before asking for help. The staff is neither engaged nor energetic when it comes to answering questions. Perhaps they were engrossed in a really exciting Weekly World News article? Or maybe they could sense I was from out of town? Regardless, the poetry section is hidden under the first large table you come to on your left side. It requires you to either squat or sit on the floor as you sort through the mostly non-alphabetized books.
There are several comfortable sofas in the back, however, with tables set up for chess and the kind of artwork on the walls that resemble orange and green paper-mache hearts with blackened honeycombs poking out here and there. There was light jazz on the stereo and someone reminded me it Guy Fawkles Day. Guy Fawkles Day! I didn't get the chance to burn anything down, sadly. Nor was I able to take a ride on the subway this time.
I love subways. We don't have a subway system in Lansing. Chicago has one. I've only been to that city half a dozen times but each time I go I try to ride on it. You end up losing a sense of self there, or at least I do, a sense of who you are, packed in those little rattling tin-boxes, rumbling at insane speeds through the dark.
The poet Alice Notley wrote in "The Descent of Alette:" "One day, I awoke" "& found myself on" "a subway, endlessly" "I didn't know" "how I'd arrived there or" "who I was" "exactly" — that's happened to me too, that sense of waking up out of your body and not sure where you are or what's happening. Isn't that what we describe limbo being like?
I know when you're on a subway your not suppose to stare at your fellow passengers, it is rude and might cause a fight to break out (we have far too much aggression in the world as it is) but I swear, there are people riding the subway that look like mist, who look like phantoms, who look like they're trapped between heaven and hell.
VII
There was a ghost girl on the subway
She slept with absolute grace
her delicate ankles crossed beneath her dress
her hand on a trashy romance novel
like she was swearing on the Bible.
That was from a small orange book of poetry, Twenty-Two Poems About Girls on the Subway by Damian Kalish I picked up at Quimby's (1854 W. North), an alternative bookshop ("alternative to what?" I asked) in downtown part of the city. Shelby and I spent all day Saturday going from bookstore to bookstore. It was a lot of fun; and I kept finding books about ghosts riding on subways all day. I find subjects like that invariably fascinating.
But, unlike the warmhearted dead, I can't spend the all my time sitting on the floor of dirty bookstores, pawing through musty chapbooks. Ezra Pound wrote: "the apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough" after he emerged from underground on a Paris subway; he saw the haunted faces of people all about him, beautiful as ghosts. Like Pound, at some point Shelby and I had to wander out into the rain, find our parked car and drive back home. And rain it did; I think I might be coming down with the flu. All weekend it had been raining that cold, Lake Michigan rain filled with the warning of snow. I was in it without a hat, phaw!