A Revving, Breathless Poem

If you've ever experienced the pangs of aging, you'll relate to this poem:

History of Desire

by Tony Hoagland

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

"History of Desire" by Tony Hoagland, from Sweet Ruin.
© The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
Reprinted without permission.

"My Son, Under the Waterfall"

a poem by Alan Michael Parker

The weight of what falls surprises, the solidity of
the slapping water, its constant and different pressures,

the way when you're thirteen everything seems
not to have happened, life itself, and yet be

dumped upon you, and you can spread wide
your arms, wide as the rest of July, and still

be filled with feeling while holding nothing,
like a movie screen, or the voice of the girl

who called on a Friday to ask about the homework.
Moss slimes the rocks, cattails rim the pools,

and the water rushing to arrive through the cut
feels like sunlight on your skin if only sunlight

would have mass and volume and pound
your head and shoulders, and with your mouth open

breathing is like laughing and laughing
is like breathing, and the surprise persists,

the sense of being between elements and standing up
in your swim trunks and sandals as though

on land and swimming at once,
and your resolve also matters, to keep hold

of these feelings, of each single feeling
no matter the future, to stay true to what you feel

and not to give the next kid a turn, the long line of
campers beginning to chant your name, and you

pretend not to hear, deafened by the lovely
crushing of the water on your head.


"My Son, Under the Waterfall" by Alan Michael Parker, from Elephants and Butterflies. © BOA Editions, 2008. Reprinted with permission.

Jen's Poem

May I brag on my galfriend Jen McClanaghan whose poem appears this month in The Missouri Review? It's a whimsical, beautiful, breathy poem (kinda like Jen herself).

"Your Own Private Oil Spill"

Here's Jen:

Feminist Bias

I can't help but read in this poem a man who lost or never caught the feminine muse by the skirt, who never invited her into his breast, never allowed her to show her power, always asserted his own intelligence, his own know-how, his own sexual dominance, and now she's gone and he misses what he has never known. His curiosity is awakened by the lap of the water; the undulations of the tide whisper to him. It must feel like a dream that never came, something beyond, like a unvisited foreign land. Or maybe I'm biased; nevertheless, this poem makes me sad.

Snowbanks North of the House
by Robert Bly

Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet
from the house...
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books;
the son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more
bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party
and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving
the church.
It will not come closer—
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing,
and are safe.

And the father grieves for his son, and will not leave the
room where the coffin stands;
he turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.

And the sea lifts and falls all night; the moon goes on
through the unattached heavens alone.
And the toe of the shoe pivots
in the dust...
The man in the black coat turns, and goes back down the
hill.
No one knows why he came, or why he turned away, and
did not climb the hill.

Cats, Academics, and Bars in Macon, GA

I went to Macon last week...to a conference on Transatlantic Studies where professors from Georgia gathered. I van-pooled from my institution with 4 other professors. It was a lively group: Inez from Education, Napolean, Dan, and Phyllis from political science, and following the van was Susanna, also from political science.

We bonded quickly on the four hour trip, sharing political frustrations and discussing our confusion about this "transatlantic" project. Having to vocalize hunger and bathroom needs has a quick way of inducing intimacy. Inez, my hotel roommate, was kind enough to share her toothpaste and answer my distress-call for soap in the shower.

The only thing I saw in Macon was the Marriott Residence Inn, a shiney new 8 lane Shell station, the campus of Macon State, and El Somethin'itoes where they have fine Marguerita's, tired waitresses, and a group of young men who assume most groups of white people in Georgia cannot speak Spanish. They were wrong, and Inez almost whopped one with her handbag, having distinguished a comment he made about us. I didn't hear the insult. My ignorance protected me.

I didn't see the Macon of the poem below, but it's still a place where feral cats fatten and sit boldly in groups at the edge of the forest near Macon State campus, watching drivers-by with a kind of curiosity that seemed gamely. They held themselves upright, a posture that connoted an unwillingness to kow-tow to humans or scram at headlights or gawking academics in vehicles. Maybe their numbers emboldened them. It seemed a large group: a dozen perhaps--not scrawny, not fur-matted, but healthy, strong and wild. They seemed to look each of us in the face as if reading a menu. What was the feeling of recognizing something lost, forgotten? Why did I feel like the scaredy-cat?

Here's the poem:

Writing On Napkins At The Sunshine Club; Macon, Georgia 1970
by David Bottoms (from Armored Hearts. © Copper Canyon Press, 1995)

The Rock-O-La plays Country and Western
three for a quarter and nothing recorded since 1950.
A man with a heart
tattoo had a five dollar thing for Hank and Roy,
over and over the same tunes
till someone at the bar asked to hear a woman's voice.

All night long I've been sitting in this booth
watching beehives and tight skirts,
gold earrings glowing and fading in the turning light
of a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign,
beer guts going purple and yellow and orange
around the Big Red Man pinball machine.

All night a platinum blonde has brought beer
to the table,
asked if I'm writing love letters on the folded napkins,
and I've been unable to answer her
or find any true words to set down on the wrinkled paper.
What needs to be written is caught already
in Hank's lonesome wail,
the tattooed arm of the man who's all quarters,
the hollow ring and click of the tilted Red Man,
even the low belch of the brunette behind the flippers.

The Poetry Gang

(Crucial Persons Missing: Laura & Christine)

Here we are at Hometown Coffee in Tallahassee: Me, Jen, Jane, and Dominic after a hard editing session:

Man in a Boat

Sometimes, my dreams are vivid. Often they're not at all. This morning, I woke up with a visual of a man sound asleep, comatose, in the bottom of a johnboat--my boat. He was large, but slept heavy like a child. His hair was long, unkempt, and curly. He lay on his back, spit dribbling from the corner of his mouth. His deep breaths blew spit bubbles.

So I woke up and wrote a poem and titled it "The Sleeping Muse," and that was good because I had a poetry group meeting today, and I went prepared with a poem to workshop. Maybe "The Sleeping Muse" came to me because I watched the documentary "Bukowski" last night and was reminded how some writers live with the muse right beside them (in a bottle or a smoke), and I was thinking about whether I had one, and, if I did, what would he/she look like. Since I've been feeling uncreative lately, I guess my brain conjured the zombie in the boat.

Crows and Girlfriends

Yesterday, Sable shot off barking when Jane and Jen came to pick me up to ride to Laura's together for our weekly poetry group. For some reason, Jane had never been inside my house, so she wanted a tour of the mess I call home. She bounded around looking unabashedly at the books stacked on tables and unfinished paintings. Anyone with dignity would have been ashamed. Not me. Guess I need to work on that. She called out, "Hello," to my teenager in her room on the phone who didn't want to be disturbed. Jane is not easily quelled, but even "I love you!" yelled outside the shut door did not win it open. Jane's a sport, so she made sure I knew that the mess made her feel right at home. I gathered my things for the twenty minute ride out to the Miccosukee Land Co-op where Laura lives with her husband Terry and their two dogs.

Before they came, I had been sitting on the back porch sipping tea when I noticed a brown leaf was actually a hairless baby wren that had fallen from its nest in the roof. It looked dead so I picked up a twig and pushed it; it jumped and opened its beak wide. What to do? Worms? I was fresh out but figured I should give it some water so I found an eyedropper and wrenched open the little beak and squeezed. I was immediately sorry because it flipped over from the gulp, waddled, seemed to recover and went back to sleep (or died). I figured I better let mother nature do the caring for this chickadee, so I scooped it into a little bowl (yes, without touching it) and dumped it back into the nest. That's when Sable started barking.

I told Arielle's door I'd be home later, and we clamored into Jane's Volvo. As we picked up speed, I felt something strange. Jane rolled down the windows, and Jen opened the New York Times to read aloud and comment. Jane lit a cigarette and took a sip of her traveling tea. What was this familiar feeling? From the backseat, I watched them gesture and laugh, but I couldn't participate in the conversation because the music was too loud and the wind too strong, but I didn't care. I was having a flashback to 1978 when all we did was ride around in cars, doing laps around the Pahokee A & P, the Hoover dike, the library parking lot, down Main, through Vetville or down Bacom Point, then always back around. When something grabbed our interest, we stopped.

So, it was so nice to be back in a car with girls, riding through the country, feeling the sun on my arms, the wind tangling my hair, listening to Ryan Adams and feeling free of all obligations--like I wasn't a mother who worries . For 20 minutes, I went back 20 years. What a car ride can do!

So we workshopped our poems, drank Laura's coffee, visited and talked, then gathered to go back.

On the road home, Jane and Jen talked about a road trip to New Mexico and said I should come. I smiled at the thought. I imagined dusty roads, sweat on brown arms from camping or hitchhiking when we broke down. Ah, how good it'd feel. It made me realize I've never traveled across country with girlfriends. I'd be game, game, game as long as I traveled with the right group: one who followed maps loosely, who stopped on instinct and let signs lead us, who might while away hours in a strange little bookstore, and who might stop to pet some cows. Jane, Jen and Laura would be such a group. And they'd keep the laughs coming.

Jane sang "Afternoon Delight" into the wind and Jen and I joined her, crooning as loudly as we could. It's so rare to be a grownup and to sit in a backseat and let your singing girlfriend with the tangled hair do all the driving.

That evening walking Sable in Myers Park, I heard a loud bit of cackling up in the top of a Chestnut tree. I recognized the sporadic caw of crows but something seemed particularly disturbing. I dragged Sable closer so I could see. As the spray of an oak cleared from my view, I watched two crows chase a hawk away, then fly back to a branch. The branch was covered with crows. They were chatting and puffing out their chests and looking at me and ignoring me and fussing and then they flew off--a dozen or so, first one way, then a dip, a turn, another way, then a circling back. I sat down to watch. Again and again, they took flight, circled and returned to roost. Maybe they were scouting for a better tree or maybe they were just cruising the air, checking out the hot spots with some time to kill before nightfall.