Big City, Little Chicago North by the River Robert Klein Engler We walk down Michigan Avenue on a December night--slow shoppers huddled arm in arm below the midnight blue in bundled coats and scarves of breath. The Wrigley Building lights shoot thick beams of gloss across the river, they glaze with frost a wall of brick-- the bridge wavers with traffic. A soft snow falls to the collected light as couples stroll by windows, stop, point out a sparkling of foil, then look up to the snow as it bows from darkness into light, white dots descending, as if the world were not right side up, but these notes were pulled from a dark well by the draw of light; as if these flakes were letters of a poem assembling negative upon a page, or cotton coming down to mend a blanket for the night, making our age forget its business, its separation, the Siberian expanse of avenues, this snow, frozen ration from the River Lethe, falling on the city like dust upon a memory, syllables of snow sifted from the sky, that warrant messengers from white to indigo-- a new world tender with the old. (Robert Klein Engler's poems and stories have appeared in Borderlands, Hyphen, Christopher Street, The James White Review, American Letters and Commentary, Kansas Quarterly, and elsewhere. He won Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards for "Flower Festival at Genzano," (Whetstone) and "Three Poems for Kabbalah," (Fish Stories, II). A previous contributor to the magazine (June '01), he teaches at Roosevelt University in Chicago.)