517 Social commentaries poems

1 Lord, what are the sins I have tried to leave behind me? The bad checks, the workless days, the scotch bottles thrown across the fence and into the woods, the cruelty of silence, the cruelty of lies, the jealousy, the indifference? What are these on the scale of sin or failure that they should follow me through the streets of Columbus, the moon-streaked fields between Benevolence and Cuthbert where dwarfed cotton sparkles like pearls on the shoulders of the road. What are these that they should find me half-lost, sick and sleepless behind the wheel of this U-Haul truck parked in a field on Georgia 45 a few miles north of Damascus, some makeshift rest stop for eighteen wheelers where the long white arms of oaks slap across trailers and headlights glare all night through a wall of pines? 2 What was I thinking, Lord? That for once I'd be in the driver's seat, a firm grip on direction? So the jon boat muscled up the ramp, the Johnson outboard, the bent frame of the wrecked Harley chained for so long to the back fence, the scarred desk, the bookcases and books, the mattress and box springs, a broken turntable, a Pioneer amp, a pair of three-way speakers, everything mine I intended to keep. Everything else abandon. But on the road from one state to another, what is left behind nags back through the distance, a last word rising to a scream, a salad bowl shattering against a kitchen cabinet, china barbs spiking my heel, blood trailed across the cream linoleum like the bedsheet that morning long ago just before I watched the future miscarried. Jesus, could the irony be that suffering forms a stronger bond than love? 3 Now the sun streaks the windshield with yellow and orange, heavy beads of light drawing highways in the dew-cover. I roll down the window and breathe the pine-air, the after-scent of rain, and the far-off smell of asphalt and diesel fumes. But mostly pine and rain as though the world really could be clean again. Somewhere behind me, miles behind me on a two-lane that streaks across west Georgia, light is falling through the windows of my half-empty house. Lord, why am I thinking about this? And why should I care so long after everything has fallen to pain that the woman sleeping there should be sleeping alone? Could I be just another sinner who needs to be blinded before he can see? Lord, is it possible to fall toward grace? Could I be moved to believe in new beginnings? Could I be moved?

Born into each seed is a small anti-seed useful in case of some complete reversal: a tiny but powerful kit for adapting it to the unimaginable. If we could crack the fineness of the shell we’d see the bundled minuses stacked as in a safe, ready for use if things don’t go well.

California night. The Devil’s wind, the Santa Ana, blows in from the east, raging through the canyon like a drunk screaming in a bar. The air tastes like a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain? The weather’s fine as long as you don’t breathe. Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture, lights turned out, windows shut against the storm, and count your blessings. Another sleepless night, when every wrinkle in the bedsheet scratches like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek, when even ten-year whiskey tastes like sand, and quiet women in the kitchen run their fingers on the edges of a knife and eye their husbands’ necks. I wish them luck. Tonight it seems that if I took the coins out of my pocket and tossed them in the air they’d stay a moment glistening like a net slowly falling through dark water. I remember the headlights of the cars parked on the beach, the narrow beams dissolving on the dark surface of the lake, voices arguing about the forms, the crackling radio, the sheeted body lying on the sand, the trawling net still damp beside it. No, she wasn’t beautiful—but at that age when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty— “Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?” Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl. Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm, packs of coyotes come down from the hills where there is nothing left to hunt.

You may hear that your heartbeat is uneven and let new tension climb around your shoulders, thinking you've found the trick for going mad. But try to keep a grip on where you are. Remember: all around you is pure city; try to stay alert. On the wide streets, so empty late at night, streaking in glass, the color of an alley, or the fall of a sideways flicker from a neon sign may utterly and briefly disconcert you— but as you go, you'll find that noise is worse. Prepare for noise. But never scream. Even tensing ears too far in advance can sharpen sirens, and as for horns. ... When you're back to your normal rhythm after such encounters, just try to stay alert. You'll never know exactly who is coming up behind you, but the sudden movement of pedestrians will finally, of course, be what disarms you.

I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do. I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also. I guess this highway will have to do and the cars and the people in them on their way. The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us. It's hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine hydrogen & oxygen binding, it'll have to do. This sky with its macular clouds also and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free.

When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September, once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action happened on Friday nights where the high school football team gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that, we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel. But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument. Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere, staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now? Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn, and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there, to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses, to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there, rising slightly and just out of reach.

I’d dislocated my life, so I went to the zoo. It was December but it wasn’t December. Pansies just planted were blooming in well-groomed beds. Lovers embraced under the sky’s Sunday blue. Children rode around and around on pastel trains. I read the labels stuck on every cage the way people at museums do, art being less interesting than information. Each fenced-in plot had a map, laminated with a stain to tell where in the world the animals had been taken from. Rhinos waited for rain in the rhino-colored dirt, too grief-struck to move their wrinkles, their horns too weak to ever be hacked off by poachers for aphrodisiacs. Five white ducks agitated the chalky waters of a duck pond with invisible orange feet while a little girl in pink ruffles tossed pork rinds at their disconsolate backs. This wasn’t my life! I’d meant to look with the wise tough eye of exile, I wanted not to anthropomorphize, not to equate, for instance, the lemur’s displacement with my displacement. The arched aviary flashed with extravagance, plumage so exuberant, so implausible, it seemed cartoonish, and the birdsongs unintelligible, babble, all their various languages unravelling— no bird can get its song sung right, separated from models of its own species. For weeks I hadn’t written a sentence, for two days I hadn’t spoken to an animate thing. I couldn’t relate to a giraffe— I couldn’t look one in the face. I’d have said, if anyone had asked, I’d been mugged by the Gulf climate. In a great barren space, I watched a pair of elephants swaying together, a rhythm too familiar to be mistaken, too exclusive. My eyes sweated to see the bull, his masterful trunk swinging, enter their barn of concrete blocks, to watch his obedient wife follow. I missed the bitter tinny Boston smell of first snow, the huddling in a cold bus tunnel. At the House of Nocturnal Mammals, I stepped into a furtive world of bats, averted my eyes at the gloomy dioramas, passed glassed-in booths of lurking rodents— had I known I’d find what I came for at last? How did we get here, dear sloth, my soul, my sister? Clinging to a tree-limb with your three-toed feet, your eyes closed tight, you calm my idleness, my immigrant isolation. But a tiny tamarin monkey who shares your ersatz rainforest runs at you, teasing, until you move one slow, dripping, hairy arm, then the other, the other, the other, pulling your tear-soaked body, its too-few vertebrae, its inferior allotment of muscles along the dead branch, going almost nowhere slowly as is humanly possible, nudged by the bright orange primate taunting, nipping, itching at you all the time, like ambition.

When you leave a Real City, as Gertrude Stein did, and go to Oakland, as she did, you can say, as she did, there is no there, there. When you are a Hartford insurance executive, as Wallace Stevens was, and you have never been to Oklahoma, as he had not, you can invent people to dance there, as he did, and you can name them Bonnie and Josie. But a THERE depends on how, in the beginning, the wind breathes upon its surface. Shh: amethyst, sapphire. Lead. Crystal mirror. See, a cow-pond in Oklahoma. Under willows now, so the Osage man fishing there is in the shade. A bobwhite whistles from his fencepost, a hundred yards south of the pond. A muskrat-head draws a nest of Vs up to the pond’s apex, loses them there in the reeds and sedges where a redwing blackbird, with gold and scarlet epaulets flashing, perches on the jiggly buttonwood branch. Purple martins skim the pond, dip and sip, veer and swoop, check, pounce, crisscross each other’s flashing paths. His wife in the Indian Hospital with cancer. Children in various unhappiness. White clouds sail slowly across the pure blue pond. Turtles poke their heads up, watch the Indian man casting, reeling, casting, reeling. A bass strikes, is hooked, fights, is reeled in, pulls away again, is drawn back, dragged ashore, put on the stringer. In Oklahoma, Wally, here is Josie’s father. Something that is going to be nothing, but isn’t. Watch: now he takes the bass home, cleans and fries it. Shall I tell you a secret, Gert? You have to be there before it’s there. Daddy, would you pass them a plate of fish? See friends, it’s not a flyover here. Come down from your planes and you’ll understand. Here.

Something almost Flemish about that water, a golden brown but clear into its depths, the plank-ends of the dock a fading gray beside it, and a boat moored at the end; something, it seems to me in looking back, about a murky bullhead on a stringer, one of those rope ones you can hardly see, so that the fish appeared to scull in place; something (the details start to widen now) about white wooden clapboards on the side of that inn or tavern where my dad had stopped, a neon beer sign staring out through glass— late in the afternoon, I drinking deep of everything I saw, now mine to keep.

In prison without being accused or reach your family or have a family            You have conscience heart trouble asthma manic-depressive (we lost the baby) no meds no one no window black water nail-scratched walls your pure face turned away embarrassed you who the earth was for.