Barter: POEMS

At the Creek Club

50 At the Creek Club The caramel hills, the chockablock houses, symmetrical patches of greenery awash with trees, the eye clicking, spoke-like: you’d think I was Cézanne, you’d think I was the only one. A four wood, madam? Perhaps an iron would suit you. By the time I got onto the course, there was nothing left but duffers, and I dutifully followed them through the swamps and ponds, out to the highway and under the trees, where shame was two ducks fucking, one beak thrashing the neck of the other. Lamont Johnson, who sucked young men’s cocks whether they liked it or not, was out with me, rifling their purses as they swung hopelessly away. All the hours they took meant nothing compared not just to his mouth but the shack where he took us: charred cinder block and a couch whose cushions had been eaten by a dog, a Formica cocktail table with a shag rug of orange and brown, and a bathroom, well, even my eyes wouldn’t take me there. I didn’t live where I could be touched in this tract after tract of a town: I was ethereal, college bound, a budding genius, dazed, before and after. 51 The “I” so unstable it’s all pinpricks and calipers, a little probe of identity with quick-strike capability— I can’t even figure out where I lived, somewhere between the Cuban missile crisis and the branch office where those scantily clad secretaries wriggle and scream before their bosses shoot buckets at the driving range. We were nothing but a spot on the carpet, a spilled cup of coffee you’d have to sponge clean. I finished wiping the clubs with the rag I kept in my pocket, spotted with green. Go ahead and make something of it, light a match to it: 1968. ...