If you are out of here, Indar, I need to get this response poem posted quick-like, and with no time for revisioning, polishing, or fixing-upping, here it be:
Cheers, and Hats Off to You, Indar
Through the Loop Gate off Como -
hang a right. Scalped tickets are always
genuine here, directions are accurate.
Pagans as far as the eye can see.
Heads on sticks - walleye, pig, corn.
Sweet Martha’s cookies come in buckets.
Sweating crowds will part as the parade elbows
through the sweat-slippery, electric end of summer.
If you get to Space Tower you’ve gone
too far – but take it anyway.
The ascent
is almost a spiritual feeling, a rise
above the sweaty thousands and
the pervasive scent of horse urine.
On a clear day you can see 21 miles in
each direction, Twin Cities history below,
and all the way to 1971, a rookie carver
striding toward destiny.
Now polka-step back past the politician
tents, past flannel shirts and free water,
and the welcoming good neighbors
to the northwest broadcast booth.
Back, between the go-carts and the Haunted
House, situated as religious shrine of
The Industry - the Dairy Building, on
into the holy inner sanctum, revolution agast:
New womanhood in ski jackets– heirs
of the Big Woods, skin like milk,
to be memorialized until they melt –
anxious, they open, bubbling in turns,
align naturally in elite concentric pairings
with certified Grade A New Ulm butter blocks.
And these 90 lb butter blocks, these 11 would-be
Princess Kays, these five hundred cumulative
Minnesota Wonders, the tens of thousands of on-lookers,
these flannel shirts, these paraders, these good neighbors,
these pagans with heads on sticks --
These and everything else real, and
everything else daring to be sculpted toward real,
for twelve days of magic, all that makes summer magic
revolve around you, Sweetheart, the glowing, laughing
smiling, knife-wielding center of it all.