A Cleveland of the Mind: Or, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a City

"It was evening all afternoon."
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

1. In Mark Halliday’s poem, Cleveland, the poet imagines “a single mother named Janey / waiting for a bus, trying to concentrate / on a science-fiction novel in the muddle of late afternoon.” She is almost twenty-eight and has a six-year-old son named Harold. Once a beautiful woman who garnered triple-takes from passersby, she’s now at the stage of life where she’s just a “two-look” problem for men. In the poem, Halliday then admits he’s made up this scene, from Philadelphia, which makes the scene even more uncanny—Janey in Cleveland, Janey as Cleveland. For the outsider, for Halliday, Cleveland is the place where you wake up to reality. As Halliday puts it, “she has become increasingly realistic in Cleveland/where you have to choose which reality to deal with when.”

2. The scuffed, the soiled, the scarred. The scalded arm of the short order cook now wrapped in a white cast, who watches his girlfriend shake her pitching arm in the sixth inning of work for the Carroll Blue Streaks, in University Heights. She’s tiring. He’d give his arm for her if he could.

3. The magnolia blooming on Magnolia Drive, and the hordes of wedding parties in black and burgundy tuxes, and ivory and saffron and powder-blue chiffon dresses, all assembling in rows for wedding album photos around Wade Park Lagoon. Matinees are free, all Saturdays from April to October.

4. As longtime denizen Mike Danko related to me, when they were thinking up names for the new stadium megaplex, one was “The Inferiority Complex.”

5. Not the Shish Tawook sandwich I bought for a panhandler at the Falafel Café on Euclid Avenue, but the panhandler’s sudden tears, as we sat at the shared table. This, after spending the morning examining the exploded base of Rodin’s “Thinker” on the porch of the Cleveland Museum of Art — destroyed by an anonymous bomber in 1970, and never arrested.

6. The stretch of Euclid from downtown to University Circle, where the ghosts of mansions fidget beneath the blight of warehouses and gas stations; the families wanted to take not just their memories past the outskirts of the city, but the houses themselves, wall by wall.

7. Cleveland offers itself not as a single unified being, but as irreducibly multiple. Whosoever saith they know it, they know it not.

8. One dark night, the twilight of yellow streetlamps echoed by the snow piled on sidewalks and slathering the street, and late for the Cavs game, I barreled through Ohio City, looking for an unfamiliar house, when I saw something glinting in the distance, in the middle of the street. Swinging his body down the center of the snowy street, a man on aluminum crutches.

9. There are Clevelands I’ll never know, nor want to know, and if I did, I would already be someone else.

10. In January air, the beach at Headlands is primordial nature — the winds churning the surf, the gulls treading the air, not a soul in sight. But in the distance, when you move through the dunes toward the lighthouse, you cannot miss the huge chimney of the Perry nuclear power plant jutting on the coast further east.

11. Because people prefer to shop in Legacy Village, a mall that has neither a legacy nor resembles a village, but has extra wide parking lots, I no longer walk through Joseph Beth bookstore, on our way from parking lot to Shaker Square’s Saturday farmer’s market, to exchange cash for cheese from an Amish family.

12. The grays, the innumerable and unnamable grays, the old milky gray, the mixing cement gray, the stone gray, the skinned knee gray—the skies of winter and all its gray guises, so permanent, when, suddenly, at five in the afternoon, the sun deigns to descend below the mask, and arcs a light so painfully beautiful, it snarls traffic for miles—the westbound commuters flying suicidal, into the cauldron of evening.

13. As in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “A Coney Island of the Mind,” or Sergey Gandlevsky’s “America of the Mind,” a place is as much inside us as it is outside us. Every daily path slowly burns its neural path into our brains, until each of us, a denizen of Cleveland, inescapably, not only lives in Cleveland, but comes to create a Cleveland, to become a Cleveland, a cleaved land, a place we cleave to, a place we are inextricably a part of and apart from, a Cleveland, a Cleveland of the mind.
from Cool Cleveland reader Phil Metres pmetres@jcu.edu

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