Sparks
Sparks is the best-named city
In Nevada or maybe the world.
Sparks, peopled by real people,
Nominatively determines
One definite place: an ‘80s
Nagel-and-velour, teal and gray
Strip club in a strip mall—
Bleached by every frequency
Of photon radiation known
In Nevada, the Atom State—still
Hanging on through grim cocaine
With C-list dancers, B-hygiene
And a rusted condom machine—
Named Sparks. Sparks, this club,
Exists, though no one has found it.
The noun seems to have encoded
Its location—as anyone’s ear expects
Berlin to sound gray, or Florence pink.
Here is a common power of words,
Whose impact on the verbal cortex
Is not a rifle-bullet neuron strike
But a green-laser tracer shotgun
Flaring past your inner forehead,
Tracing the image of this nightclub—
Sparks. Divorce has always meant Reno.
Breaking up and then making up,
Or even better doing it twice,
Is pure Sparks. Why stop there?
Everyone in Sparks has a stormy life;
Every one of us lives in Sparks.
Which of you has never matched
A stereotype? Lift your hand.
Twenty-five years ago,
In Pacifica, the Sparks of SF,
Living with an older woman
From Baltimore, which is to say
From Sparks, we quarreled badly
(She was loud—I go terribly cold),
The walls were thin and the cops were called.
It seemed in the ensuing process as if
A train on one track had been shunted,
A portal ruptured to a fractured world,
The planet of Sparks—equally real,
Though not in any way equal; and
The police left and the real returned,
Without so much as a court citation.
Still have I tasted what I tasted then:
A bit of a tourist, at least a sponge.
Friends, we must be serious about
All the sadness and ruin of the continent,
Of America, of Nevada, and of Sparks—
Something of the place, mainly the people.