Arts of a Cold Sun: POEMS

Crawfordsville Confidential

29 Crawfordsville Confidential 1. In the land of milk and cream delivered early and daily, and always in glass bottles, we care about good grooming and, of course, news of slurs and curs . . . Can it really be that home becomes a place to be stranded? “I don’t see a single storm cloud anywhere in the sky, but I can sure smell rain,” out on the edge of Crawfordsville, Indiana, where the answers and questions become identical as evil twins. 2. Basketball ghosts bounce and sweat again in that second-floor gym in the middle of July— that never-to-be-forgotten home of the first-ever Boys State Championship. Rusty jump shots and long-ago corner hooks rim out in a stream of dusted sunlight. “Just to play the game, don’t you know, you know, no matter how much the sacrifice . . .” How searing afternoon’s vagueness now, dreamed in a daylong haze of headache pills downed at the General Lew Wallace Motor Lodge: how the arc of the ball rises to echoes of split-jump cheers in lubricated air, when phantom bodies strive and leap and go prostrate 30 to that squeak of rubber on polished wood— in a game of shirts and skins. 3. You can only wonder how Ezra Pound dissected his time here, among tractors and proctors and temples of antebellum style, as he cooed sweet Greek in the ear of his secular Madonna . . . Just now, two pigeons greet first daylight on the Green of Wabash College. Something to be said for being scandalized silly, and in more than one language when life becomes holier than the Crusades. And what’s more—didactic passions eventually drive you insane, thinks young EP, so what? Sew buttons, ha! And make it new always . . . and always leave the door cracked open, a light on, and one foot on the floor. 4. “The meatloaf here’s not very good,” warns waitress Lucy, a pretty girl with a tooth missing. Indifferently, day proceeds utterly. Off Country Road X-10, out by Carcus Creek, driving past Minnie Betts’s florist shop and what’s left of the old city jail, you figure each small detail adds glory to any story. “Relax,” says Elton Bidwell, the county’s dead-buzzard collector, “I’ll take care of us all when we com’ on home.” 31 5. The town goes dark in a killer storm. Collective forgetting and forgiving occurs. But safety comes in many forms. In this vast black you get to thinking about giddy joys and little sorrows, the curse of full employment at minimum wage, and those conspicuous professors— their bowties and braces speaking to the ages and marking moments of learned unworthiness. Maybe, it’s vacuum-packed fear in a stage-managed town. Time to guess what’s behind each tiny crime and local leer, at once rancorous and baffling. Strangers need not apply. A few lights click on at the Shortstop Grille. These cruel weathers turn asphalt slick. The old intramurals begin again. 6. Early Sunday morning and a drunken Elton Bidwell is strung like a scarecrow on his front porch swing, deposited by Grand Wizards from the Odd Fellows Lodge bar late last night—reminder to those devoted folks heading up Church Street with songbooks in hand, that home sure proves just another place to be stranded. ...