Thinking of Missouri

THINKING OF MISSOURI / Mike White If, during a sun-shower, you ducked into a poolhall, You could rest your forearms on the worn wooden bar, And besides the occasional clack of balls, The only sound would be the murmuring gutters As the asphalt's oil spots, washing away, broke Into the hues of a beautiful bird's back, And a last dry leaf might be skittering up 9th Street, And, in an eddy at the corner of Cherry, flung upward Through the mauve lambence of the shopfronts In the shade of the Tiger Hotel; and you might notice Something pass glimmering, like a gentle swell, Across the face of the man on the next barstool, As though he'd seen the particular shade of hair Of a girl he's entirely forgotten—one of the faces So fallen and folded from thirty or forty years Of escape from work, from wife; although he still Can muster an obscure grin or a weak game Of snooker, anyone can see it's over. Looking west from the Tiger's ninth floor, Past the town's one brown brick smokestack, On the highest hill is the high-peaked roof Of U.S. Grant School, with its one broad Heavy-limbed oak, its low black wrought-iron Fence dividing schoolyard from the hill's East face, where the public cemetery's tiers Of stones are laved in an amber dust-filled light; The severely-kept grass which stained my jeans Left a smell so close and deep it governed My sleep. In the hotel at three a.m., The men still vague from hospital or cocktails Are turning and turning in the flannel blankets, Sweating, beginning to forget their names. And the only sound is the bus winding down Through its gears on Locust Street, Or the stray dog pawing the bins In the wet alley behind the hotel, Or the surge of the west breeze 26 · The Missouri Review Graced only with a scent of unmown hay, Combed by the oak and sycamore woods On the river bluffs where the town fades Into hills—town of my boyhood, Town of my slow dying. Mike White The Missouri Review · 27 ...