It's called On the Way to School.
And it started from looking at--
in Chicago, there are a lot of buildings
that have been painted.
Flat brick high-rises have been painted with all kinds
of exotic facades.
So that from a distance, they look like Greek Roman
Renaissance architecture.
And they're rather intriguing, even though you
know that they're only painted.
And it's a poem that in part is about the way all art leaves
out things.
On the Way to School.
Even a lover of the bare truth must
admit this new facade painted on the high-rise
is a big improvement over the blank face.
Pilasters and corbels freshly applied, with a golden pediment
and a frieze.
They seem to float above the bare bricks
like a blurred dream, and admission of how much beauty
the bricks left out.
Even art that remembers to build beauty in,
has to confine itself to a single theme
and exclude most of the beautiful truths available.
Even the epic I like to teach each fall, where
the great battle is still raging.
Every hour, more proof of how angry Achilles is,
his friends keep losing ground and he still won't help.
What Homer leaves out to concentrate on a war
he points to openly and assimilates.
It relieves him to say the battle turns
at the hour when the woodcutter loads his wagon,
and heads home.
To compare soldiers crowding in for a kill, to summer
flies clustering on a milking pail.
When Achilles yields to Priam and unties the corpse of Hector
from his chariot, he seems to guess
that something has been left out, in his quest for glory.
As his quest for glory reminds me
what I miss to rebuff the world.
This morning on my way to school,
the sun, striking the high-rise head on, turns its painted face
so shimmery the illusion takes me in.
Marble is rich in detail, it's the real marble
of the City Hall put up when the romance of commerce
and self-rule was still strong.
Elmira and Arcade in friendly competition
with Troy and Ithaca.
There were columns rising 100 feet from the forest,
for a city that didn't exist then and doesn't now.
No details are left out when Homer
stops the fighting for 1,000 lines
to describe the world, crowding the face of Achilles' shield.
Here are the two cities in gold relief, the wedding,
the trial in the marketplace.
The harvest and the harvest festival.
Boys and girls dance on the polished dancing floor.
All this Achilles carries on his arm,
which seems to mean he knows when he sees that coming, what
life includes.
What exactly death leaves out.