Steven Schroeder | mutual invisibility
In the garden under a statue of Linné,
I negotiate mutual invisibility
with two young rabbits. We stay
still for some time, contemplating
his cold gaze over a mass of warm
blossoms the day after rain. He
moved here not long after I, thinking
he’d be more at home among classifiers
and systematizers than on a Lincoln Park
lakefront full of naïve social Darwinists
working on their tans. He settled
close to social sciences and classics,
but his eyes are on the School of Law,
and he smiles a little at the thought
of Rockefeller and the GSB to his left
and serious baseball fans far to his right
who know each middle relief pitcher’s ERA
against batters on both sides and can calculate
the odds of a hit on the fly, who know
Ozzie was a chess master, that nature
red in tooth and claw is about nothing
other than being in the right place
at the right time.
from Anthology of Chicago | 2013
