17º

It could be colder.
Wind along the river.
Ice on the trail.

Homeless sprawl.
Tents. Trash. Define home.
Multiple choices. Less.

Icy. Dicey. Watch your
step. Frozen footprints.
Define permanence.

One guy bent in half
leans toward leaving.
One arm sways stiff.

Part of a bigger story.
Clock face obscured.
Seconds meaning

less. I half-believe
he will half-rise
from the half-dead.

Me, I’m a volunteer
ice dancer taking
the fresh air.

Should I call 911?
Define emergency.
Strung out. Wrung out.

Getting his money’s worth
out of a bad trip nowhere.
Define nowhere.

Me, I walk here often.
Afraid of my own
frozen footprints.

Well past him, I call no
one. His spray-painted
message, indecipherable.

Or maybe a clear call
for help. The day after
the shortest day, and he’s

making it shorter.
No boats on the river
or bikes on the trail.

Define hope-
less. Would I
call if he fell?

Define choice. Outside
my street nearby
in an old church

turned into condos
another man squats
beside an outlet

phone plugged in
for the power. He
isn’t talking to God

though today is Sun-
day. Though, who am I
to say? Define cold.

It could be colder.

*

Private Limbo

The hammering repetition of blues
mimics our own with slight variations
like the pierogis made by old women
in the basement of St. Vlad’s church
that I can almost see down the street
by leaning out the window of my church,
St. Matthews, repurposed into condos.
I want to find the holy water font and dip
my fingers in, to expand my definitions
of water, font, holy.

*
A train hits its horn tentatively
not sure there’s anything ahead
that wants to be warned. Many
do not sidestep. Many face it head on.
Why not just jump off the trestle
and be done with it?

*
I am either ten minutes early
or a lifetime late. I never finished
the list of all the things I’d missed
and the people I’d disappointed
when drunk and stoned or trying
to stop. The list dangles from a chain
like a phonebook in an abandoned booth.

*
Pop the hood and let’s look into limbo.
A recent Pope said Limbo doesn’t exist.
Just like its clear definition. When you
take out the s in exist it makes exit.
That’s something I think about
in my private limbo. Sometimes you
can capitalize Limbo. Sometimes a shrug
is as good as a drug to a blind man’s bluff.

*
I was encouraged to believe Limbo
was where unbaptized babies hung out,
a giant nursery in outer space, one big wall
of wail. The limbo is an especially limber dance
that I’ll never come close to mastering. Limber—
take off the er and add an o. O Limbo,
I wish I could go lower.

*
The blues are a limbo with tinted glass
like the drug dealer’s car windows
as it idles out front, waiting for a prostitute.
The 61A Bus to Limbo passes by.
It is full, and it is empty. A neighbor
measures the square footage of limbo
with an eternity measuring tape.
Ask him about it, if you dare.

*
ENTERING LIMBO
Speed Limit
Up to You.

*
Above us all, on the trestle
over the river, a train slows
to follow a deer across the tracks
taking its sweet, old time.

*

The Pine Tree in Front of the Old House on Rome

now dwarfs the house, the whole block
askew with its spiky spine. Nobody had
much success with trees then, everybody
building cars, the city in love with steel.

Nobody bothered to have a theory.
We cut down dead trees and planted grass
to fill the messy graves, create the illusion
of symmetry on our ordinary lawns.

Or we threw another tree in the ground
on the same stubborn spot. Plain
was alright. No time to mess with trees.
Impractical, without benefit.

If the trees lived, hell, there’d be leaves
to rake. No extra pay for that extra work
for factory fathers with grease-rimmed nails.
Then my father went rogue, digging up

a tiny pine from up Michigan Up North.
Planted it in the open middle of the yard
since his four boys had all outgrown
that small space. The spiky point:

that knee-high tree grew over thirty feet
and wide enough to brush brick, trespass
the sidewalk. The tree now stabs the sky.
Too late for new owners to cut that sucker

down. Imagine having to hire somebody
to fell that tree between roofs and wires.
A Tree Service. All those needles killed
the grass around the tree’s prickly edges.

Everybody wanted a place Up North.
My father couldn’t afford one
so he’d stolen a piece and brought it home.
No old neighbors left to wag their middle

fingers at its absurd height.
The man loved the smell, and the idea
that something stayed green. Today,
we idle in the street out front to take
a look after years away. At 96,
he’s embarrassed by the work
of getting out of the car, much less
knocking on the door to confess

he’d planted that monster.
He opens the window
and twists his head up to see
the point. He takes a whiff.

*

Color Theory, Detroit

Our streets echoed shades of gray
our dull voices scraping cement
vainly searching for sparks.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad. My mother
drove a lurid orange Maverick
and struck mysterious poses with cigarettes.

My father practiced the fine art
of slamming doors. He funked
the thunk. Street dogs applauded.

We believed in Crayola’s eight orderly
colors and the correct spelling of colors,
despite our proximity to Canada.

Dimmer switches were unnecessary.
On and Off sufficed. Like Pregnant
or Not Pregnant. We had no faith

in rainbows and too much
in streetlights. Blood was no stranger,
but a form of punctuation.

*

Cold Comfort

Talking to Benny, his last living friend,
on the phone from Arizona, my father stares
at his grilled cheese cooling a greasy stain
into a paper towel, desire wilting. A slab
of pickle laid out beside it soaks through.
Benny won’t let him go.

I read my blind mother the church bulletin,
scanning for familiar names among
the sick, dying, dead.

My father keeps saying, but Paul,
but Paul—the other friend they’ve both
just lost. Benny’s not letting him finish
a sentence, still in ice-cream-selling mode,
though no customers remain.

I’m guessing the but has to do
with finding Paul on his floor, surrounded
by scattered empty bottles of his last hobby,
picked up again after forty dry years.

When Paul’s wife died, I guess watercolors
just didn’t cut it anymore. At 68,
I’m guessing it all, full of relative youth
and special intentions, unwritten bulletins
of future eulogies. Pray for the repose

of the soul of…. The black spot
in my mother’s vision is not sin.
I hope Benny’s not onto the Gospel
of Bomb Pops again, Epistles
from their Old Neighborhood in Detroit

obliterated, abandoned—thus, oral history,
thus, preaching to nostalgia’s choir.
My father holds the phone away from his ear.
He points from me to the sandwich.
Eat it, he mouths.

*

Jim Daniels’ Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems was published in January by Michigan State University Press. Other recent books include An Ignorance of Trees, nonfiction, Cornerstone Press, 2025, and The Luck of the Fall, fiction, 2023. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.