Late at night from four hundred miles up
(as seen in this NASA light pollution map),
our native state becomes a sparse Rorschach:
star-pocked on black, stray photons issuing
south and west in diagonals down its taut
freeway wires, from the fiery white dwarf
of Chicago (extinguished along the curve
where it touches black lake water) toward
its lesser stars, Springfield, LaSalle, Peoria,
East St. Louis, and distant points beyond –
Tulsa, Sioux Falls – the lights diminishing
as they track its tainted rivers and sanitary
canals, routes engineered to suck sewage
from the city’s asses into the unlit heart
of downstate. The consistency of nowhere
is, and is not, an illusion: there are towns
in the dark counties,
known to hold human
spirits; each sends its fractional lumen out
as far as it will reach – projecting it from
the weariness of floodlit metal bleachers
behind the local consolidated high school
where, mid-October, Friday night, it’s third
and long (it’s always third and long); faint
fluorescence wafting up from the split-level
basement window as we do what we must,
registered sex offenders, part-time clowns
jazzed out on God and methamphetamine,
Junior Rotarian anarchists. It blinds, this
residuum of lives, cupped by the mirrors
of soybean leaves in unrepentant furrows
and as quickly reabsorbed, the afterglow
from all these lights too dim to register.
Nothing happens. (It is still happening.)
Originally published in Crab Orchard Review