Elegy with a Lobster Reading the Newspaper, Yellow Lilies, and the Gowanus Canal

The bones of the half-built condo building drape shadows
violet as the fuzz of graffiti tags 

into the church beneath it that is now a school across 
from the textile arts center which also holds Zen 

meditations where the air smells like an oil painting 
hung in a gallery the night before an opening,

newly touched by the artist’s knife, chemicals on the tongue
like lozenges candied with honey,

and all around you there is drum-like hammering,
a metal barrel being dropped into concrete, 

pulverizing the first layer, the second, ripping apart
the recent surface and prior surfaces

into the cold depths where the tributaries want 
to trickle with the original story, 

flush into a flood, and might, and will, and here 
a mural along a coffee shop about to close  

depicts a lobster reading a newspaper
an artist painted in crayonlike pigment, 

so I change a diaper on a bench, find my Bic pen
rolled into the scrunched folds of the fresh one 

stuffed into the clothlike shopping bag 
replacing the plastic bags I remember 

gifted to my mother and dropping toward the sidewalk 
with gallons of milk before all this

when we were told we were saving trees 
with this pale and shimmery nothing 

opening in our hands, and I could tell you 
facts about this place, who was here 

first—erased, erased—when there were yellow 
lilies growing, rainbow fish in the water,

and today, the sky Citibike blue, where one
almost runs me over in the crosswalk, 

I could ask particulars to add up, each afternoon 
warmer than the last, along the Homeric windows,

curtains partly open in V’s, smudged by sun,
where landlords are encouraged to 

vent out trichloroethylene, fumes from the soil 
a box factory leached here 

when executives, elbows on a table, chortled and said,
Just dump it, or something like that 

in my movie version of history, and you can 
buy a T-shirt that says Gowanus Swim Team 

with a skull on it, which is what you would look like 
if you dove in past the oils and particles 

that look like pink, gold, & black marbleized paint 
you can observe from a bench 

at the Whole Foods overlooking the Canal, 
crunch a Honeycrisp apple,

observe Teslas rattle the bridge, the broken
bottles, Fentanyl caps, and Starbucks cups.

I bring my children here, near here, to do 
a kind of dance none of us understands, 

ropes dropping from the sky, 
in a building across from two-story homes 

crouching underneath the new glass towers
sprouting around us like beanstalks 

in the fairytale I never liked,
giants waiting at the top, 

about to eat you
near the superfund site where you 

will be promised, if you can pay, to apply
yourself and live in the air. 

TYLER MILLS

Tyler Mills’s latest books are the memoir The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press, 2024) and the craft book Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets (University of Akron Press, 2024). Awarded residencies and fellowships from Yaddo, Ragdale, and Bread Loaf, she teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and lives in Brooklyn, New York.