Dear Uncle North,
By Robert McDonald

I love the sweet
loping boys, their corduroy jackets
with threadbare elbows,
a scorched-open hole on the leg of their jeans;
transparency, I tell you, can be a kind of gift,
this might be one definition
of a ghost: someone who desires
the things
of the world but cannot
be seen
and desired in turn.  I haunt this city
or I become the one
haunted
by the rush and return,
the repetition of trains,
each car bearing a lanky
and oblivious stranger—dark-eyed,
pensive, he might dream
of the lover waiting at home, or just
wonder
if there’s still ice cream
left in the fridge—a mist
rises off the graveyard
between Wilson Avenue and Montrose,
you can see it from the El—
and if the dead in their still
and snowbound villages
glare with longing
at this sparking and
clattersome train, it’s because
in every season
the breath
of eros is the best
and most dangerous
weather.

Robert McDonald’s writing has appeared in Court Green, Boxcar Poetry Review, Gertrude, The Columbia Poetry Review, and Disquieting Muses Quarterly, among others. He lives in a charmingly dilapidated coach house in Chicago, and works at an independent bookstore. He is the co-author of A Field Guide to Gay and Lesbian Chicago. He’ll probably be your Facebook friend if you ask him.

© 2008 prickofthespindle.com