There is only a snout
that breaks the cloud surface
of paint-flaking undershot glass
And it's only her tail
stirring the sky over the Institute
and rattling the ribs of the city.
You never quite see this secret Sky Lizard,
this Big Gator Mother,
only what she leaves us,
in her wake, printed in the bellowing mud,
vibrating on the rooftops and swamps
of bars and breezeways.
I went looking for The Big Gator Mother in an airplane
but then in a boat on the green concrete river, in my quinine pith helmet,
I found her.
Found her pattern like a track in wave rhythm.
Found her smile in frozen balustrade, in a window up below me,
for I was underwater and heading downstream,
looking for alligators and lily pads.
Attention, citizens: The Big Gator Mother
requires your children.
You may drop them off the bridges,
plop plop plop
before going into town.
She's a lazy old lizard, or so she seems,
lying about with her snout poking out of the street,
her eyes up below
and her slow undulation
that ripples the asphalt, rising and falling.
She is eating your children as they bob in green water
and then motoring elsewhere.
The Big Gator Mother says nothing, she is
below in the cloud, swimming, she is
one long line in the ancient mud, through Sullivan and Wright,
across the prairie sky, across the ancient lazy rivers,
where she bobs for your children like little green apples.
She is everywhere here, her beauty assured by a steady diet of children.
The children are cried out and silent
as she takes them for harvest, pulling them up
and crunching their soft bones, then
shitting them out,
fertilizing fields by the Institute,
weaving strands of their eaten dreams into iron grates,
stone blocks and steel kick-plates, stitching their beautiful sobbing
into Gothic limestone shawls that
she drapes over mounds of skulls in whimsical fancies.
Spires of skulls and dreams, paintings that boil your heart down to tallow,
tallow to spread cross the sky like a schmear,
a ravenous breakfast of children and memory,
stocked up against hunger and greed
by the secret Sky Lizard,
who stalked her way out of the ancient mud Nile
and went wandering.
I don't eat children. I grow them and sell them
and walk over children on my way down to picnic,
their soft bones crunching beneath my penny loafers,
they surround me like lattice, appealing and mocking.
Some have been there forever.
Some we just planted yesterday.
But there they are! I am staring out the window now, down to the green river, where everything beautiful is bleached white of sorrow, where joy slows down, remembered only in brick, where spines poke from the Earth like dinosaur fossils, where the Big Gator Mother presides under all,
heavy and hungry.
--May 3, Chicago
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