Poem: Canal and Mott

Preface: The poem below was originally conceived as part of SPARK, an online gallery and collaboration of international artists organized and curated by Virginia artist, Amy Sousa. The picture that inspired the poem can be found at my blog or in SPARK 6 or at the photographer's home page.

SPARK is a unique project that I was happy to participate in, in which artists of different disciplines were paired by the curator. Each artist would exchange work and the other participant would use the shared piece as an inspiration for a new, original work. I gave one of my poems to a photographer. He did a black and white portrait that he felt was a physical representation of my poem. He gave me a photograph and I wrote a poem about it.

This is the poem I wrote.

Inspired by a photograph by Gabriel Shanks of a man shopping at a kiosk in Chinatown (NYC), both the photograph and the poem are named for the location of the vendor, shopper and captured moment: Canal & Mott.

Canal and Mott

The ghosts of what's to come shop here.
Armed with bright shopping bags
that smell of cloves and Szechuan pepper,
but are filled to overflowing with totchke moments
savory regrets and battery operated
appliances of destiny, these zeitghosts overtake
our common sense(s). They are reverse
pickpockets who slip gaudy keychains
and snowglobes into the bags of unwary tourists.

Possibilities chase us up the street like rain
forcing us to take shelter in storefront windows
and kiosks full of everything we never knew
to need. Buy nothing and still it will all come
home with you. The open Air is five-spice thick:
the bitter hickory smoke of a street vendor's poultry
competes for top note with the invisible breeze
of star anise and cinnamon that trails after
an old woman exiting an adjacent restaurant.

Hao Hao.
Pungent but good as the moment passed,
the moment to come waits like a mugger.
Stars appear in the still light city sky
distant and dark as fennel seeds in rye bread.
We can't help noticing
every sixty seconds we spend here
we grow one minute older.