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.
By David Selzer