Every now and then when the wind howls and the howdies come in, I am inspired to write a poem from something I see out there in the urban jungle. Poems are hybrids of both song and speech, the distillation and ablution of thoughts. The word itself comes from the Greek poiein, or to create. My mother had a veritable library of worn and dog-eared poetry books in the den, because her mother read poems to her and fostered a passion for verse and composition. Back in the days before the radio or television, my grandmother played a game with her brother and sister, a kind of rock-paper-scissors of poetry recitation. They called this intellectual exercise poem wars, and it involved reeling off long passages of Longfellow or Chaucer until a mistake was made and another person had to pick up the line and continue reciting.
Standing up and reciting poetry is almost a lost art now, but every now and then you’ll find someone who can reel off a line or two or perhaps a whole poem from something they had to memorize back in school, and there’s still a few teachers out there who believe in the magical rhythm and cadence of a classic poem recited. My father, now 101, bursts out spontaneously, even inappropriately, at dinner with lines from In Flanders Fields, a poem written at the end of WWI by Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae.
Take up your quarrel with the foe
To you from failing hand we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields
When I am riding in the car with my grandsons we often speak in ridiculous rhymes, which boil down to a kind of madness where we use words that don’t exist or use noises that should not be used in polite society. Not too long ago we played a song for my grandson while we were out running errands, a folk favorite by Peter, Paul and Mary called “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Normally, when we listen, we would have made up funny lyrics and substitute new words to make the song take on a silly tone, but Cash latched onto the line that little Jackie Paper was growing up and discovering more “mature” dragons to play with. I could tell he was saddened by the thought of a dragon being left behind with no one to play with, and he scolded me for adding in what he thought were lyrics that muddled the purpose of the song.
In Cash’s mind, he sensed there was something reverent and tender about Jackie’s relationship with the character of Puff, this magic dragon, and about all relationships. Listening to the lyrics was perhaps helping Cash bridge that delicate chasm between his six years and his next level, seven and eight, when dragons and elves and gnomes “make way for other toys.”
Poems take license to transcend those kinds of endearing moments, to use our language in ways that our prose is not well suited. Events and people that might be difficult to present in a sentence have the freedom to be twisted or buckled so that one is left, not with mere facts, but a familiar feeling or memory. It’s the smell of your grandfather’s bomber jacket that has been in the attic for years. It’s the déjà vu’ you get when you drive past the house you grew up in. How do you write about those experiences such that you feel your grandfather standing next to you, or you see yourself playing Kick-the-Can in the front yard again? A poem might do that. A few simple lines, one powerful word, and you are back there again, moving backwards along a timeline you never thought you’d see again, one that you thought had moved away to another town.
I hope you’ll welcome this poem I have written. To describe it is to only say that the lady I write about, Carol, is a lady you may have seen walking through Evansville, my hometown. She seems resilient enough, but our town has left her in a rubble of changes that, as you may observe in your own city, are not so good. They are the cracks in our sidewalks, clouds of bus exhaust, and dank forgotten seats in run-down theatres of people sitting alone and walking home unnoticed. We might be waiting at an intersection one day and meet this same lady, Carol, and she might have the face of someone we once passed on the street, someone oddly familiar we met in this poem…
Always Carol
Under the weight of her tangled gray hair
Always Carol walks alone bent and spent,
lugging a concrete bag with discounted fruit
and a few necessaries chained to her shoes.
She shuffles along like Always Carol always does,
towards home where tall weeds and memories sit gathering dust in volumes
until 2:15 when the omni-bus screams down JFK BLVD
exhausting fumes that fill her debility coat
and backfire into her loaf of white bread.
Grocery store, then back
Side walking back home,
watching crack after crack pass beneath her
a slow demarcation called Invalid’s Path
for those who are not valid anymore.
That is the scope of her day.
She sits waiting with her warm bottled water,
for the November metro and rides the angled avenue with Lee Harvey
to watch a free vintage movie at the recently reopened Book Depository
Always Carol sits waiting at 12:30, looking for her bus, killing time,
waiting and waiting,
and becomes the solitary assassin of age.
In the middle of the theatre where Always Carol always sits
she is invisible.
Yet, the MGM lion spots her and stares her down,
roaring first one way and then the next
Always Carol watches that proud, tired beast yawn one more time,
then drops off the screen to fall asleep next to her,
dreaming of donated popcorn.
The movie is coming to a theatre near you:
America, We Love You So Much
subtitled Land of the Free and Home of the Grave,
a film where an issue of Kleenex Monthly and white peonies are delivered
every National Disability Independence Day
by motorcade
in stacked cartons stamped only “THE LONELY.”
Afterwards, the credits will drop her off like dead weight,
on a grassy knoll
where she cannot die any faster
But Always Carol with the bent and buckled neck
prefers a good mystery that twists and turns,
near her half green house
with half a street number
and a life just shy of
History and Elm.