October 28, 2007

Stuart Dybek, "Windy City," Streets in Their Own Ink (FS&G, 2004).

Part of the fun at crashing at friends' houses, especially when the other friend is also a writer, is raiding their shelves for things you wouldn't normally otherwise read. Hence Dybek, who I regret not having taken a workshop with while I was at Western Michigan studying medieval arcana.

"Windy City"

The garments worn in flying dreams
were fashioned there--
overcoats that swooped like kites,
scarves streaming like vapor trails,
gowns ballooning into spinnakers. (ll. 1-5)

I get the use of parallel structure at work here in lines 3 & 4, but to my ear "kite-like" sounds so much better in line 3.

And then I thumbed through the Bernadette Mayer science writing book.