In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • In a Landscape:VI
  • John Gallaher (bio)

What's the most earnest you've ever been? Perhaps thisis me at my most earnest. I have two children. At some pointI'll no longer be here, and I hope they still will. Mostly, though,I'm not all that earnest otherwise. Earnest people tendto make me feel vaguely antagonistic, as being earnest allows oneto say the ends justify the means, and mean it. They say things like"nothing's ever enough," and I'm tired of nothingever being enough. But on both sides of whatever issuethere are these earnest people with these prepared noisesin a formal arrangement. It's a tennis match between two extremesand the rest of us are the net. I watched a divorced couple oncefight over the top of a Toyota Starlet while passing off their son. Wednesdayand every other weekend. The boy was crying. Everyone was crying.

I wonder if I cried when I was young and passed between my fatherand mother in Portland when I was three. I've nomemory of it, and there's no one left to ask. We're really getting atvery little now, finally, back and forth, so that either of us could writewhat the other one's going to say next in these argumentsand stories. And even that we tend to get used to, just as one getsused to everyone else being wrong about things. Or howone gets used to that feeling when you just say something you're thinkingand the whole group rises to cheer for you. The first shock of it. The glow.

It's at a dinner party, and you flirt a little with your diet. Maybe youmake a joke about candles. This is conjecture. But dinner partiesleave one with formal constraints, even if there are infinite waysthose constraints can be expressed. The last oneI went to turned out to be a "group meeting" of some sortthat I thought was to be a conversation aboutwhat we think of America, but it was all really just a wayto try to get us all to canvas for Democratic candidatesin our area. Your friends and neighbors! the young organizer saidwith all the earnestness of revelation. It was one of the holidays,the dinner party before that. We talked about death,and I said so far, it's been easy not being a ghost. Margowouldn't even admit that much, saying that her familywas full of mostly dead people, who she's surewrite letters home explaining it all, but never send them. [End Page 125]

John Gallaher

John Gallaher is the author of four books of poems, most recently Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2011), co-written with G. C. Waldrep. His next book, a memoir-poem entitled In a Landscape, is forthcoming in 2015 from BOA. He lives in rural Missouri and co-edits the Laurel Review.

...

pdf

Share