49th Parallel

West of Montana Street and due east of Denver
in what used to be an all-black neighborhood
stands a statue of Paul Bunyan, the patron saint of Portland.
Oregon, that is; this city whose name was decided
in a coin toss, then shanghaied and dragged from Maine 
across the Great Divide.
Though he stands thirty-some feet high,
grinning like an idiot, he fits in
with all the other Stumptown hipsters,
with his facial hair and flannel,
leaning forward on the handle of his ax.
It’s just past noon and I’m waiting for the train, 
watching some kids put pennies on the tracks,
and I follow Paul’s gaze to where it rests upon 
the Dancing Bare -the sign of which is helpfully festooned
with a crossed-out cartoon of the other kind of bear, 
you know, the animal, I guess to avoid confusion,
as if customers might expect to find
actual performing animals rather than just
human women taking off their clothes.
The door opens and out steps an angel
-that is, a small blonde girl wearing a halter top
and a pair of cardboard angel wings
spray-painted white. There is glitter in her hair.
She squats on a milk crate and sucks down a cigarette
beneath the banner advertising Amateur Night
and six-dollar rib-eyes every Tuesday.
It’s a trite image, strictly freshman photography stuff,
but Paul can’t seem to take his painted eyes off her,
and I can’t get her out of my head as I ride south,
past the string of old motels -the Viking, the Palms,
and the Monticello, its sign lit with a picture 
of that famous presidential residence, whose facade 
displaced the buffalo and the Indian on the nickel,
though we must be at least three thousand miles away
from Virginia.