Windows above the doors,
as I remember it, at the Board of Health,
tuberculosis skin test station nearby
built when even waterworks
were pretty in a way, green copper visors
over red brick blackened in time,
and the feeling of file cabinets
full of sputum and viols
of venereal samples,
slices of human lung prepared
for slides, as if the biology
room had mated with raccoons,
or I got that idea from the entry
to the Allegheny Cemetery,
home of the bones
of Steven Foster,
and bones attached
to place names and streets
Wightman and Negley,
and Rankin, where a friend
was the son of a Russian priest,
and the swells’ planting
contiguous with roughened up places,
Bloomfield, Friendship, Lawrenceville,
and carved Union cloaks
draped over tombstones,
and the incinerated remains
of the Armory workers
who exploded, and Josh Gibson
with his bat. My own bat,
I dreamed of after walking
there in the cold. It was mad
because I sliced its belly
with a potato peeler
and bonked it with the potato grater
as it flew at me in the kitchen,
making latkes, or maybe gnocchi.
Bat dreams, maybe they are good,
just an early threadbare Pittsburgh
boiled down to abstract streets
with its Scotch-Irish aristocrats
still somehow Presbyterian
with their Gothic fonts
and conspicuous paucities.
The vistas of sunsets and lagoons
were lit up in all the stained glass
mausoleums turned on by sundown,
the irrationality we bring ourselves
or in it comes in with clouds from the lakes.

The next day, we all felt a bit fevered and ill.

Original appearance in Pangyrus.