You spirit of grace in the taffy machine’s chrome arms
At Morris’s Candy performing a sarabande
Unknitting and knitting again immaculate sweets.

You spirit of order in a plank across uprights
Between us patrons and visible bottles: a bar,
The barrier presence attending to our pleasure.

Angel of displays recurrent, mortal and porous,
Dry goods and hardware and the fearsome eyeless
Heads I remember at Dlugos’s Ladies’ Hats.

New spirits of the body, Pilates and Threading,
I needed explained. My ignorance not like that
Of those who hissed “At thy unequal’d Play

The Alchymist: Oh fie upon ’em,” says Herrick
Son of a goldsmith, praising Ben Jonson. Like Twain’s
Dauphin and Duke, his Subtle the Alchemist scams

Us townsfolk, selling Abel Drugger a magnet
To attract customers. No joke, ruthless Angel:
In Greenwood murderous white rioters destroyed

Eldridge’s Grille and Lewis’s Meats and Sundries—
More shocking than the bank, the church, more even
Than torching the movie theatre named the Dixie.

Lethal deviser, you did remove the X-ray
At Hirsch’s Modern Footwear, but only after
I watched my live toes wiggle in monochrome space.

Bill Russell bought Slade’s Barbecue in your gaze,
And Walter Benjamin bought paper and shirts.
The Nazis knew from you which windows to paint.

In the upstairs Lucky Diner we immigrants
Looked white with Egg Foo Young and across the hall
Lived the De Nuccis. At their Liberty Market

My grandpa bought the apple that to win a bet
He threw high over the A&P tower—your Great
Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, defunct,

Or is that story of small-town prowess a legend
Dreamt up by Bruno Schulz your offspring, at home
In his apartment above the family store.