HOME THOUGHTS

Lake Michigan reached beyond the horizon

like a sea in the pale September haze.

I watched the silvery waters stretching

towards Canada’s vastnesses, Greenland’s ice,

the North Atlantic, the Irish Sea.

A long dead Chinook salmon nudged the pier,

it scales barely glinting in the morning light.

On Michigan Avenue a parade

of Mexican social clubs passed by,

the air dense with bullhorns and mariarchi bands.

In the Art Institute of Chicago

I stood before Caillebotte’s large canvas

‘Rue De Paris: Temps De Pluie’ with its

dark clothed bourgeois couple – the man

moustached, holding a black umbrella,

the woman pretty, her arm in his. They are

looking across the rain filled street at something

we cannot see. And I thought of the print –

quarto sized we mounted and framed – that hangs

by the garden door in the hall. The couple

look forever at the door’s bright glass.