It's Donald Hall's birthday

Poem with One Fact

by Donald Hall

"At pet stores in Detroit, you can buy

frozen rats

for seventy-five cents apiece, to feed

your pet boa constrictor"

back home in Grosse Pointe,

or in Grosse Pointe Park,

while the free nation of rats

in Detroit emerges

from alleys behind pet shops, from cellars

and junked cars, and gathers

to flow at twilight

like a river the color of pavement,

and crawls over bedrooms and groceries

and through broken

school windows to eat the crayon

from drawings of rats—

and no one in Detroit understands

how rats are delicious in Dearborn.

If only we could communicate, if only

the boa constrictors of Southfield

would slither down I-94,

turn north on the Lodge Expressway,

and head for Eighth Street, to eat

out for a change. Instead, tomorrow,

a man from Birmingham enters

a pet shop in Detroit

to buy a frozen German shepherd

for six dollars and fifty cents

to feed his pet cheetah,

guarding the compound at home.

Oh, they arrive all day, in their

locked cars, buying

schoolyards, bridges, buses,

churches, and Ethnic Festivals;

they buy a frozen Texaco station

for eighty-four dollars and fifty cents

to feed to an imported London taxi

in Huntington Woods;

they buy Tiger Stadium,

frozen, to feed to the Little League

in Grosse Ile. They bring everything

home, frozen solid

as pig iron, to the six-car garages

of Harper Woods, Grosse Pointe Woods,

Farmington, Grosse Pointe

Farms, Troy, and Grosse Arbor—

and they ingest

everything, and fall asleep, and lie

coiled in the sun, while the city

thaws in the stomach and slides

to the small intestine, where enzymes

break down molecules of protein

to amino acids, which enter

the cold bloodstream.

Source: Old and New Poems (1990).