29 January 2010
27 January 2010
Sometimes I say that, too.
Something Else
Southern Comfort) --Sometimes you say I'm something else,
and you mean I'm good, really good,
but honey, don't say that, please?
Reminds me how my dad used to say,
I'm just not myself today.
As if here were some kind of imposter dad.
Then he'd ask things like:
Why don't you go play with James?
Has the dog had his walk yet?
Will you kindly get out of my cotton-pickin' hair?
Sometimes he'd come home from work
carrying his hat and a brown paper bag,
and I'd know he wasn't my dad.
There were at least three daddies then,
sort of like daddy A, B, and C.
Like that TV show. Which will it be,
bachelor 1, 2, or 3?
My mom often said he wasn't the man
she married. And I thought about that.
How, when they were married,
I wasn't me, either. I wasn't anyone.
I didn't like to dwell on that.
It kind of gave me the creeps,
but I liked to ask,
Were you really in love then?
Of course, she'd say.
Did you hold hands?
Yes.
Kiss in public? Sit on his lap?
Yes, yes, I did all that. Once
She even showed me photos
she kept in her lingerie drawer
beneath her slips and silky things
she never wore anymore: him
in his spats and slick-shined hair,
her in a pink crinoline cocktail dress
with her long bangs clipped back
in pearly barrettes. Not a thought
in her head, except maybe
Don't I look swell? And
Love me. And he did.
Did he say so?
He said it every day.
He was something else back then.
20 January 2010
Wow
Hitchhiker
Imperfect Thirst) --After a moment, the driver, a salesman
for Travelers Insurance heading for
Topeka, said, "What was that?"
I, in my Navy uniform, still useful
for hitchhiking though the war was over,
said, "I think you hit somebody."
I knew he had. The round face, opening
in surprise as the man bounced off the fender,
had given me a look as he swept past.
"Why didn't you say something?" The salesman
stepped hard on the brakes. "I thought you saw,"
I said. I didn't know why. It came to me
I could have sat next to this man all the way
to Topeka without saying a word about it.
he opened the car door and looked back.
I did the same. At the roadside,
in the glow of a streetlight, was a body.
A man was bending over it. For an instant
it was myself, in a time to come,
bending over the body of my father.
The man stood and shouted at us, "Forget it!
He gets hit all the time!" Oh.
A bum. We were happy to forget it.
The rest of the way, into dawn in Kansas,
when the salesman dropped me off, we did not speak,
except, as I got out, I said, "Thanks,"
and he said, "Don't mention it."
06 January 2010
I don't like snow but I like Catherine.
SNOW: I
Love About Love) --All night, snow, then, near dawn, freezing rain, so that by morn-
ing the whole city glistens
in a glaze of high-pitched, meticulously polished brilliance, every-
thing rounded off,
the cars submerged nearly to their windows in the unbroken drifts
lining the narrow alleys,
the buildings rising from the trunklike integuments the wind has
molded against them.
Underlit clouds, blurred, violet bars, the rearguard of the storm,
still hang in the east,
immobile over the flat river basin of the Delaware; beyond them,
nothing, the washed sky,
one vivid wisp of pale smoke rising waveringly but emphatically
into the brilliant ether.
No one is out yet but Catherine, who closes the door behind her
and starts up the street.
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