The fat old man walks heavily
Nakedly from the office
To the kitchen to refill his glass,
A little water in the night.
A mouth dry from reading
Poetry of strangers aloud,
Softly mouthing the words
Dries the tongue like talking.
The knees must at least seventy,
The body thirty years behind
He is grateful that it is four am
And that he has curtains.
I am grateful there are no mirrors
So I do not have to see him.
I’m not sure if i will finish the book into my adulthood, or even if this “poem” belongs with the others.
Montgomery, Alabama
279-8819
Is the number
to my rich uncle’s house, though I almost never called to talk to him, but instead one of his five sons. Or it was, from the time they built the new house in a modern high end neighborhood called Eagle Pass at 120 Lookout Ridge and I memorized one evening at Wednesday night church over forty years ago. A few years ago I was sitting in the kitchen at their house. We had just buried my aunt, who died months after my uncle. We, being out of town relatives who spent the night in their home one last time. The beige wall phone rang and someone answered it. But I thought to myself right then, “I’ll never need to call that number again.” And now there are so many numbers and addresses, so many people and places I keep alive in my mind with their address and phone number who will finally be dead to me when I am dead, too and no one will keep those numbers in their head, but maybe someone
will keep me alive by holding the number
they will never call again
Jasper, Alabama
Coal trucks
rumble up and down
mountain sides while I eat moon pies in the back seat under the moonlight and wonder at the oddly shaped TV tower. I don’t know why I know it is one,
unless I asked daddy.
He knows everything.
Metal peddle cars
that look like real cars
from the 1940s, giant orange leaves make patterns on the older brown ones and older cousins tell terrifying stories of boogie men in the woods and how they cut off my brother’s head with a butcher knife. My brother pops out
from the shed
when I begin to cry.
Chicken houses
and a dusty dark attic
because the parsonage is in no condition for habitation. We weren’t allowed into the chicken houses, but the smell came into ours. The stairway led up to a closed door until my brother snuck up and beckoned me to see when mama was out.
Cobwebs, boxes and dirty dormer windows
and I never went
up there again.
Three houses in two years,
I never moved so much.
This a little brick house and no chickens. My brother went to school and I played all day with a big red barrel full of plastic bricks from the American Brick Company but I liked it most when daddy would
sit on the floor after supper
and build with me.
Aunt Shirley,
daddy’s pretty redheaded younger sister
came to visit me. She and her English professor husband came to visit us all, but Aunt Shirley always made me feel like she came to see just me. And we doodled for doodle bugs in the holes in the sandy yard out back, but found none and I told her the tall grass in the adjoining pasture was Johnson grass and told her I guessed they named it for President Johnson
which she thought was cute
and shared with everyone at supper.
Somewhere we lived
next door to a nice lady
with a ball chime with string you could pull and it would play the song about mistletoe and she would always give me a kiss when I pulled it. She smoked a lot and in my four-year old way I told she needed to quit because it was a sin. I knew about sin because my daddy was a holiness preacher and he knew everything. She said she knew it and tried hard to quit and I suggested she hold her breath like you do to quit the hiccups and she kissed me
and I hadn’t even
pulled the string.
The nice lady
had a TV
and we didn’t. Movies and TVs were sinful, but we had a radio and record player built a long wooden cabinet with a top that opened a sewing machine table. I mostly listened to Firestone Christmas LPs all year long.
But when JFK was assassinated, I went down to her house to watch little John-John salute the coffin. Later I realized he and I were the same age. I was so glad nobody assassinated my daddy and I went back across the yard
and climbed up
in my daddy’s lap.
To the east
of our house
lived a little girl who was adopted. She was the first person I ever knew of who was adopted. My brother said her parents were dead and so she had to go live with somebody else. My brother usually told the truth, but I don’t know about this story. Somehow I got it in my head they had been shot, and somehow, maybe because of the loud popping, I thought of my mama making canned biscuits every morning. I dreamed I had been shot and I turned into the empty foil backed paper wrapper the biscuits came in, gently rocking back and forth attached at both ends to the little silver discs. I woke up glad to be alive and so hopeful no one would
shoot me and turn me
into a paper wrapper.
Kenny’s daddy
had been in the big one
even though Kenny and I were the same age and my daddy was a teenager following the war on maps in the newspaper. In the basement they had an old phone that you had to click and say “operator”, only there was no operator. And they had Nazi helmets and knives and stuff he took off dead Germans. We couldn’t touch it, but Kenny and I would go play in the vacant lot next door with its tall grass and crawl on our bellies and sneak up on the Germans and throw hand grenades
that looked like green pine cones.
We always won the war.
Active, Alabama
I was five
when I learned
to hate Christmas. I still loved Jesus, but we had a fall Sears catalog and there were matching “wet-look” jackets, his and hers and I thought if I could give my mom and dad a set, they would be hip and cool like the people in the catalog. Mama was the best in the world and Daddy knew everything, but they were not so fancy. When I tried to tell Mama why I wanted to get the jackets, she just said it wasn’t the kind of thing they would wear, so we got her another box of Fabergé powder and some pink house slippers and Daddy some more long brown dress socks and they were happy. I got corduroy pants and blue blazer. And I hated Christmas for all the disappointments it was and all the disappointments to come.
I don’t love Jesus, anymore,
but I still hate Christmas.
Mrs. Latham lived
across the road
and she played the piano at church and she was beautiful and her daughter, Regina was my best friend. I was in love with Mrs. Latham and she didn’t mind. Regina and Mrs. Latham and her husband lived in a nice brick house and we would go for Sunday dinners and for Regina’s birthday where we played “pin the tail on the donkey” and I won. And the Lawleys lived next door in an old wooden farm house with mules in the barn. They were Mrs. Latham’s parents and would come over sometimes when we came to visit. Somebody made macaroni with bacon on top and a thick layer of cheese over everything.
I liked macaroni like my Mamma made
Out of a blue box.
Sometimes we would go
to Regina’s grandma’s house
to play and she had cedar bushes growing along her long, low front porch and we would find the caterpillar eggs hanging from the limbs and they were like silky Christmas ornaments and we would rip them open to see the bug inside. No one told us not to and Mrs. Lawley would bring us little green bottles of Dr. Pepper that said “10, 2 and 4.” Mrs. Lawley’ house had an iron stove in the middle of a dark kitchen with a tin flue going off at an angle out the roof and in the in the winter the room
was hot and smelled
of pine knots.
Behind our house
but really more behind the church
a sandy path ran past Mamma’s garden and down to a little stream. My brother and I would go there to look for fish and tadpoles and build damns and other things. Mama took to resting a lot and she couldn’t see us where we played so sometimes we would walk up the creek through a large culvert under the federal highway and up onto the dirt parking lot of the truck stop. And the lady there would give us free candy and even though they came to Daddy’s church,
she never told our Mama we came
so we never got a whipping.
Henry was a little boy
about my age who came to church
with his grandma and one Sunday morning in the winter we got to watch old Mister Ellis vacuum wasps that came out from around the windows painted to look like stained glass. And one night during a revival meeting, he told me about his uncle who lived just across the tracks had tried to kill himself with a shotgun, but instead had blown his face off but was going to live. I tried to imagine why someone would do that and what it would be like
to live without a face.
Byron Brush was
almost my cousin
and he lived in a nearby town were his daddy was the preacher. One time he got to spend the day with me and we played in the creek and the teepee Daddy built out of old burlap sacks and a pine tree. But the thing I remember most was racing across the harvested corn field with broken stalks all askew to get to the GM&O train as it raced through the darkening dusk. He won by a mile
and I so wanted
to be Byron Brush.
As I am getting wonderful encouragement and intelligent advice from talented friends and editors, I am moving forward with my collection/epic poem.
I am still struggling with the physical concept of layout. Currently I am leaning, on the advice of my editor to a paragraph style with a bit of modification.
Like this:
Twenty-Thirty-Seven Mona Lisa Drive,
the first address I ever needed to know
so I could tell someone how to get me home if I was ever lost or if the school needed to know, and I knew it the first day mama drove us to school. We rode in the back of the brown Dodge pickup with the wooden toolboxes on the sides never thinking until today what the doctors’ and lawyers’ kids must have thought. Later we rode our hand-me-down bikes the mile to school past a barking dog and the bully at the end of the street, past the Episcopal church
with its low hanging eaves
I could touch from the ground.
Actually, her suggestion was more like this:
Twenty-Thirty-Seven
Mona Lisa Drive,
the first address I ever needed to know
so I could tell someone how to get me home if I was ever lost or if the school needed to know, and I knew it the first day mama drove us to school.
We rode in the back of the brown Dodge pickup with the wooden toolboxes on the sides never thinking until today what the doctors’ and lawyers’ kids must have thought.
Later we rode our hand-me-down bikes the mile to school past a barking dog and the bully at the end of the street,
past the Episcopal church
with its low hanging eaves
I could touch
from the
ground.
As I see it, something like one of either of the above is better than the traditional style verses of short lines. The straight on paragraphs have twin problems as much as I tend to like them. The poems don’t look like poems to the casual observer, and my 80-100 poem book would only be about 10 pages long, which would hardly seem like a book and yet, it would be.
Any thoughts?
Connell’s Point, Arkansas
Mama’s green dress and hair in a tight bun holding me on the old wooden porch of the tiny parsonage, while daddy and my big brother bring Happy and her twelve puppies around the corner of the house,
looking for all the world like an unspotted version of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and me, a two-year old sitting on the porch amazed, transfixed and a little horrified, only now realizing this is my first memory of life.
Daddy and my big brother rush into the house where I am eating my biscuit with syrup and butter
“come see, come see, daddy killed a black snake!” my brother yelled. Biscuit in one sticky hand and mama holding the other I tumble out on the front porch to see a long black snake at the base of the steps neatly chopped into twelve bloody pieces. I peer over the edge down the three feet to the dirt
and finish my biscuit.
Across the way stood an old school house once painted, now gray clapboard rotted and sagging
and a poor family squatted there for a while. Twelve children, more boys than girls and the older boys would walk the top of the schoolyard swing sets like balance beams until they fell and moaned in the dirt.
My father the preacher, late for his own service with a washcloth spit washing our dirty faces and hands
and walking us across the dirt road to the church where we all sang a capela hymns and spirituals until daddy would get up and tell us stories.
Old men, to me, at age three, though much younger than I am now sitting after Sunday dinner with the preacher and his family, telling tales while the women cleaned up and all I remember is the smell of a house too many years heated by wood smoke
Two little boys in a stall shower, in a bathroom built onto the back porch, as an afterthought when indoor plumbing came, leaning out the back screen door to holler at mama, picking strawberries
in the little strip between the house and the cotton field, “mama where are the towels?” Mama in her yellow rubber gloves and straw hat wiping her brow with her arm, straightening, then peeling the gloves
and coming in to dry us off.
Vickie Moore where have you gone?
Behind the parsonage with the weeping willow tree that shaded our window, behind the cotton field,
lived Macleod Moore and his wife and daughter. On nice days all four of us would walk back the dirt road,
chasing grasshoppers and missing mud puddles and we brothers would play with Vickie, who had a nice toy box
and whose age fell half way in between ours but I was only three when we moved away. I never saw Vickie again
until my 14th summer when we were visiting and I saw this pretty girl in pigtails bouncing down the freshly graded road driving her daddy’s pickup truck. This past year when I called my old friend Donna Ray
to tell my mama had died, I asked about Vickie. “She, and her husband both died, a few years ago.
Cancer.”
Mama’s green dress
and hair in a tight bun
Holding me on the old wooden porch
of the tiny parsonage,
while daddy and my big brother
bring Happy and her twelve puppies
around the corner of the house,
looking for all the world like
an unspotted version
of One Hundred and One Dalmatians,
and me, a two-year old sitting
on the porch amazed,
transfixed and a little horrified,
only now realizing this is
my first memory of life.
Daddy and my big brother
rush into the house
where I am eating my biscuit with syrup and butter
“come see, come see, daddy killed a black snake!”
my brother yelled.
Biscuit in one sticky hand
and mama holding the other
I tumble out on the front porch
to see a long black snake
at the base of the steps
neatly chopped into twelve bloody pieces.
I peer over the edge
down the three feet to the dirt
and finish my biscuit.
Across the way
stood an old school house
once painted, now gray
clapboard rotted and sagging
and a poor family squatted there for a while.
Twelve children,
more boys than girls
and the older boys would walk the top
of the schoolyard swing sets
like balance beams
until they fell
and moaned in the dirt.
My father the preacher,
late for his own service
with a washcloth
spit washing our dirty faces and hands
and walking us across the dirt road
to the church where we all sang
a capela hymns and spirituals
until daddy would get up
and tell us stories.
Old men,
to me,
at age three,
though much younger
than I am now
sitting after Sunday dinner
with the preacher and his family,
telling tales
while the women cleaned up
and all I remember is the smell
of a house too many years
heated by wood smoke
Two little boys in a stall shower,
in a bathroom built onto the back porch,
as an afterthought when indoor plumbing came,
leaning out the back screen door
to holler at mama, picking strawberries
in the little strip between the house
and the cotton field,
“mama where are the towels?”
Mama in her yellow rubber gloves
and straw hat wiping her brow with her arm,
straightening,
then peeling the gloves
and coming in to dry us off.
Vickie Moore where have you gone?
Behind the parsonage
with the weeping willow tree
that shaded our window,
behind the cotton field,
lived Macleod Moore and his wife and daughter.
On nice days
all four of us would walk back the dirt road,
chasing grasshoppers and missing mud puddles
and we brothers would play with Vickie, who had a nice toy box
and whose age fell half way
in between ours
but I was only three when we moved away.
I never saw Vickie again
until my 14th summer
when we were visiting
and I saw this pretty girl
in pigtails bouncing down the freshly graded road
driving her daddy’s pickup truck.
This past year when I called
my old friend Donna Ray
to tell my mama had died,
I asked about Vickie.
“She, and her husband both
died, a few years ago.
Cancer.
I could ask my mother I suppose
We had homemade tacos tonight
Tomatoes and sweet onions with patent numbers,
Mexican lettuce and Kraft’s version of cheese
Yet they were quite tasty
We baked the cardboard-boxed, shrink-wrapped
Pre-formed and cooked shells to a nice crunch
And I remembered tacos past
Being very young in Montgomery
Mama cooking the meat and the tacos
in skillets on the stove top
The tacos were the white soft, flat stacked kind
The meat a little greasy, draining on paper
Did she cook them in water or margarine?
I know it wasn’t butter, progress and all
Instant coffee, biscuit tubes, Kraft Mac and margerine
Where did she learn about tacos? In Mississippi?
At the ladies church luncheon? Better House Keeping?
I could ask her, but I never have, and why did she change
To the pre-made crunchy kind when I was in my teens?
And how did she cook on the stove top
In the summer in Alabama without A/C?
Where are the little grocery stores,
Meat in a case and fresh local produce
Stacked in bins and a few rows
of canned goods and staples
In short crowded aisles in between
I had a Mexican in-law for awhile
Once a year we would cook chicken tacos
An all day event and the night before, too
Tasty, but a lot of work, but they were Mexican
How did my mother come to make a taco?
How did she ever leave fried chicken
And slow oven roasted beef?
I could ask Mama, and maybe I will
Because there is a lot I don’t know about tacos
(I wrote this in 2003, unfortunately, I can no longer ask my mother, as she died this past January)
 | An Old Interview, wi… on If I Sang All My Songs |
 | Sylvia Vaughn on Cursing in Circles |
 | anthonyuplandpoetwat… on Cursing in Circles |
 | evanempathy on Cursing in Circles |
| Evan Girodet on Cursing in Circles |
