Houston is too big to figure out on your own. (It might be too big to figure out.) After I moved here and started feeling trapped by the freeways, outstripped by the strip malls, and ungrounded by the skyscrapers, I did try. I walked, I ran, I biked, I drove, I rode the bus, I took the train, but there was always more to see.
There is also always more to read. One of the first writers who helped me make (some) sense of Houston was Phillip Lopate, who taught in the Creative Writing Program at UH and wrote for Cite in the '80s. In "Houston Hide-and-Seek," an essay that expands on the arguments he makes in "Pursuing the Unicorn: Public Space in Houston," (Cite 8), he calls this place a "decentralized octopus, gobbling up all the land around it." Nothing has done as much to my perception of Houston as that image. Loop 610 became for me this great lazy eye; 290, 249, 288, 225, 59, 90, I-10, and I-45 became tentacles, their feeder roads studded with the barnacles of big boxes being flung further into the prairies and piney woods around us.
Inprint, Houston's literary arts nonprofit, and the Rice Design Alliance, which publishes this blog, asked other writers to busk poems in Market Square Park for Sunday Streets this weekend. Sam Mansfield, Gwendolyn Zepeda (who contributed an essay about the Old Sixth Ward to Cite 87), Meggie Monahan, Caitlin Maling, and Chris Murray set up at typewriters and composed on the spot, for free, a poem for anyone who wanted one. Maybe they, too, needed help figuring out this city of ours.
Here are a few that the buskers wrote:
Bicycling in Houston
I dreamt I died and went to velo-paradise
which resembles Houston more than you might imagine ---
the city is flat, it rarely rains, it never snows
the margaritas flow freely
and there's always an alternate route.
by Sam Mansfield
Market Square Park during Sunday Streets HTX. Photo: Allyn West.
From Your 1st on the 1st
when I ride my bike throughout these city streets
when I watch the children dart through fountains and
laugh when they fall without fear
when the sun begins its slow descent and I remember that
I, too, will be 77 one day
when I close my eyes and see all that I have not been,
and all that I still may be
when I imagine you walking beside a marina
full of hope, peace, and wonder
i feel only gratitude
by Meggie Monahan
O Creator!
Thank you for the scalding sun that makes us sweat
in downtown Houston so we buy bottles of water that do not
stay cold long
Thank you for the air
it's not as clean as it was or should be but
it's better than New York or L.A.
Thank you for the hours, minutes, seconds, ---
For the slivers of moments
and the momentary glimpses of eternity
reflected in the window of a high rise
Thank you for snaking trails
fringed with violets or daffodils
studded with wild raspberries
and traced by the shadow of the errant moth
flickering at the margins of thought
Thank you for bikes to course these trails
wherever they lead
through fern-carpeted woods
or sandy desert inclines
Thank you for legs
strung with muscles and tendons
and granted the power to bend, stretch, pedal, and kick
their way through the canbrake
These are just some of the things
that make life worth living.
Others include: James Brown, red wine, friendship,
the poetry of John Keats, Mexican food, and Wimbledon.
What would you add to the list?
by Chris Murray
Busking for a bicyclist at Market Square Park. Photo: Allyn West.
Meggie Monahan, Caitlin Maling, and Chris Murray busk poems. Photo: Allyn West.
Architecture
A person cannot bisect easily
a vertical line by sight.
We are horizontal creatures,
land bound. Maybe this explains
the awe of the Rice building
or why we cap the Chrysler Tower
with jewelled windows
like the crown for a God
we are only beginning to imagine
one to work and live within.
by Caitlin Maling
