- Close Reading, and: Bishop’s Filling Station
Close Reading
for WTL
Neatly tugging out the weeds in the austere garden I care little about,
it isn’t a lone cricket in the pachysandra or tractor mowing the wheat down Maratooka—
but crackle of cane fields in Maui
blazing black against the black volcanic soil that mother said men harvested for my cereal
fifty years ago in my childhood summer while visiting the incense-grandma:
oh, until now, I never saw how mother wrote to Hawai’i in block letters
and did not eat meat for forty-nine days
after her own mother died of laboring into old age (what did I know, what did I know). [End Page 65]
Bishop’s Filling Station
When I think of gas stations I think of free salad tongs or dishes at the Esso snug between the parkway and Hardscrabble Lane. The heavy smell that coats your throat. Joey and his son. Oil-soaked. Oil-permeated. My parents not really liking the blue wheat design on the dishwasher-safe platter, especially since we didn’t have a dishwasher but for once not commenting on not liking the design even though mostly that’s what our family talked about: liking or not liking the way something looked. They didn’t say anything about Joey or his son either— I’m sure grateful they submerged their heads into whatever jalopy, as my dad called our secondhand cars, and charging us not too much. I guess Joey knew that we were a carful of artists who knew nothing about oil filters or spark plugs. I would learn later despite drivers ed. at Pleasantville High not to bother driving so not to have to bother with dipsticks. I do miss what we used to call the filling station back in 1964 in between Asian conflicts that would never be about victory or even safety ever again. Somebody does not love us. Somebody did embroider that doily. [End Page 66]
Kimiko Hahn is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Narrow Road to the Interior. Her honors include the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award. She is currently completing a collection of poems inspired by science, “Toxic Flora.”