Barter: POEMS

In the Old Days

8 In the Old Days Some days I lose track of my happiness, plodding through the meadow thinking of something grim I remember. It was a banal little town, with cliques for the kids, wardrobes fashioned by the Sunday Times. Everybody who wrote poetry, I thought, came from that town. Everything was tantamount, approximate, a shovelful of dirt, a car rattling in the driveway, loading my arms with packages, and as I emptied them requiring I be adored.You know that bully of a poet, that clumsy oaf certain powerless women embrace, fucking the armor and the damage, waiting to be slapped? Well, there was a sliver of Whitman on my knees tending to the wounded, kissing their hands, dying to hold one in my arms, to go on and on, and leave them stammering by the window. That was the old days. I forgot when I set fire to ROTC files, when I sat in jail—for whatever sick, ego-infested reason—to bring a sliver of justice to Mississippi. More, I want to say something of the hayloft above the sickly chicken coop, 9 and the turgid pea-sized pond out the window squandered with ducks and duck droppings and a wire fence electrified.There’s no poetry in it. But we take the ladder up, there’s something infinite to the trip, something hand shaking, there’s the tremor I see in Matisse’s cut-and-paste paper birds all red and blue from some childhood I never had: Linda in her white slacks and cream-colored blouse, infinite the self-sustaining, replicating image of climbing up there, losing an earring, it’s nineteen ninety-two, what we call the country’s an incomprehensible babble of shoves, litigation, strip searches, thefts of BMWs, and out the hayloft door I see nothing but country, that nameless scattershot splashing of hills and rumpled-up sugar maples, and if my sexual obsessions stutter, linger, pause, accelerate, if they can’t be stitched together, if they’re of no interest to anyone, at least I am not alone, desperate, preaching the parallel lessons of Dido and Aeneas. Even if my ex-wife steals my every last Mozart sonata, I can still smell the moldy straw, the weathered siding’s faded beige is a blessing to me, her body too, the story she’s telling me, my brain’s on fire with it, years later, years of happiness later, far from that dump we call governance. ...