Saw Bucktown
Headed north.
Past the club lucky and the bucktown market.
Passed no goats — saw a cow tho.
The cow saw the stars, but not the park.
The park holds a crowd and baseball and dogs —
the crowd and baseball and dogs ignored the cow.
The cow looked towards a church —
no one within the cathedral.
The cow did not blink in its looking.
Only standing and staring for the cow.
Nearby — a different crowd idles.
A bike hangs from the rubber structure.
The bike’s owner waits nearby.
The cow is visible, but does not turn to look.
Runners pass on the left, headed east.
dogs from the park occasionally.
Cars underneath travel north.
The rubber never moves — even as tires
roll all around it, in every direction.
The rubber forms a wheel, or a dragon.
The bike rides the unflinching dragon.
Its owner waits nearby, watching.
Headed south.
Past the shuffleboard club and the small cheval.
I went up to Bucktown over the weekend. The town was originally named after the prevalent goat farms in the late 19th century. Many of its residents were Polish immigrants, and Bucktown formed a part of the ‘Polish downtown’ in Chicago. This trend of Polish settlement persisted through the 1960s and explains the presence of Saint Mary of the Angels church, a Polish Cathedral style building that is open during the day, every day. More recently, Bucktown has gentrified, as represented by businesses like the Small Cheval and the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club. A variety of art installations within the neighborhood, but the two that I focused on the most were within sight of each other. “Cowlileo” was commissioned in 2001 by the Renaissance Companies, a real estate company, and sculpted by Buffalo, NY artist Ken Aiken, who was renting from the Renaissance Companies at the time that he designed a different series of “Holy Cow” sculptures. The other sculpture is Chakaia Booker’s “Brick House,” a 34-foot spiral of recycled rubber that borders the Bloomingdale trail, a.k.a. the 606, an elevated trail that runs along what used to be a railroad track. The sculpture was installed
For this poem, I wanted to play with the repetition that I saw in this week’s poems, where, for example, Lisa Robertson would revisit a line from earlier in the poem with only slight modification. I also thought about travel and motion and how these ideas contrast with the stationary nature of permanent art.
