6. LITTLE POLAND

I watch each Saturday in Little Poland
at Allen's Peerless Junk.
It's a ghoulish feast (before lunch)
of licking, lapping flames,
small bodies in the open pit.
They crouch upon a vast
glittering fallen Goliath with
his armor and his baubles—
(You can almost see the giant limbs outstretched,
a hand upon a sodden chest,
and think of that
sausage jumping
in the bubbling pan at home)—
Chewing little rubber, paper, oilcloth islands
and cardboard cliffs
with rippling, snapping jaws,
but seeming to devour little.

Black, smelly smoke whirls upward,
hot within a cold aseptic wind
Etching in summer
inky filth on a humid sky;
   In autumn,
dark warmth in cold gray air;
   In winter
disappearing into streams of falling snow
that cover the lukewarm scrap heap with
a grayish film;
   In spring
green:
testimony to the new by old things burning.
That's all year round at Allen's Peerless Junk
on Pilsudski Street
near the black old iron railway bridge.
So come, won't you,
come with me, our bellies empty,
and we'll watch the flames this Saturday
(thinking of bubbling kielbasa)
feasting before their week-long fast.