geometry and fire burned again and again
now. late night. in black legacy owned tuxedo with white formal crisp purchased from the Orthodox in Oak Park glossy loafers from amazon the day before walked downtown spoke streets of new Detroit with my daughter shuffling back after surveying the disintegration of the Detroit auto show she did well in heels carrying it off reminders of a decade when we walked for college football causing blisters and slow shuffle pain where she voiced no complaint she wants nothing more than to be back in the car on the way home to Ferndale now new Detroit she looked beautiful, mature, something new not known to me in a gaze instantly elegant, classy, and pulling off an orange gown signifiers of Nepalese Buddhist monks, 1960s burlap tapestries and 76 orange ball gas station signs that sprinkled i-75 into 1980s Ohio the haunting of the French colonization the centuries of an Indigenous layout of the main streets from wampum paths conquered by steel and plow mowed down for the map spokes of Paris covered over by Cobo geometry and fire burned again and again floods of Detroit river importing and exporting guns and butter for the dawn of world wars the blueprints to take over and liberate paris and cascade and create the glory of a 57 Chevy workers of the World had bled on the streets we walked that night followed by a blind pig rebellion Detroit on the verge of rekindling the incandescence of a purple Parisian art deco fairy fantasy in my tux bowing while the red curtain Detroit auto show fades to black for Las Vegas laser lights and mathematical markets of Beijing the arsenal of democracy in the rearview back to Ferndale
The Guardian Building with it’s golden Pewabic tile was completed in 1929. She had to have made a point to see it. My eyes have seen what she saw!
One of the surprising players uncovered for me was the Edsel Ford painting. I knew Diego Rivera as a painter of the “labor movement” and figured him to have socialist tendencies. For decades I’d been to the DIA to take in “the mural” but never knew the story behind it. The fact the Fords were the ones who funded the mural was a profound revelation of irony. On the surface “the mural” shows the awesome destiny of man and industry, the worker, it’s hope and growth along with an undertone of warning and fear. It’s like something or someone is making this thing go and we’re actors not necessarily the directors. As time went on it sounds like Rivera and Kahlo became disillusioned with their wealthy benefactors and were eventually run out of town in New York City when Rivera’s proposed mural had Stalin. My generation grew up with the communist threat as the current generation wrestles with terrorism. The Detroit Industry fresco tackles these concepts before World War II, before The Cold War, and before Reagan and Gorbachev. The exhibit gives you the untold story behind the scenes of the dialectical drama so simply explained as black and white in schools and the media. These forces comingled at one time. Comingled in Detroit. The mural means this to me now and Kahlo was a hidden force.
Recently some bard colleagues of old have called me out about not writing the poetic.