Kentucky Woman’s Solution
If you’re fixing
to do something,
I’m going to smile.
Solution offered
as intention to action
gets credit enough—
no need to bless
my heart.
If you’re fixing
to do something,
I’m going to smile.
Solution offered
as intention to action
gets credit enough—
no need to bless
my heart.
About the size of three city blocks
standing diagonal toward the business section of downtown
and obliquely towards the capital building.
Buff brick colored station with ornate carvings,
fountains and archways at the main entrance,
extensive plaster molding, 24-foot ceilings –
take a deep breath and get your bearings.
Three floors of seating along the far end,
a turret, and clock-house on the other.
Brightly painted signs directing –
directing toward baggage, express,
or freight on the ground floor.
Loud clanging from loading docks on the south
where men with sweat-stained shirts
and disproportionally sized biceps work–
work to ready crates of green bananas
and engine parts for staged cargo cars.
Cargo cars that will eventually take all to final destinations,
farmers crops from the Midwest
wheat, corn, and soybeans
stored in open freight cars at the roundabout.
Trailers of green lumber from forests of Arkansas and Missouri
out towards the edge of the shipping dock,
waiting for their engine to be assigned.
The boxcars filled with ore and coal
from mines following the trailers.
Each foreman called over the other
coordinating, and speaking the language of the rails
so departure times are dependably held.
I brought home from the market
a half-dozen peaches
which I kept in a sack
on the counter until soft
beneath the thumb,
put them in the fridge
and on a hot afternoon
sat on the back stoop
and broke the furred skin,
yellow strings wedged in the gaps
between my lower front teeth,
a rivulet of cold juice down my chin.
I ate around the pointed pit,
slowly eating three of six,
the red-veined meat
giving way with a pleasing slurping sound.
The sweetness was complete:
a hint of tart that made me smile.
All the while the sun beat down,
drops of sweat rose on my arms,
ants staggered across bare ground.
Brown earth absorbed every drop of juice.
A rose is a rose, unless it’s the smell of your father
arose from a coke can, wry as an impish djinn who
answers each plainly pensive prayer by ever so
simply plopping upon your plaintive palm,
as cold and lithe as a twelve-foot tarpon, the shell
of an inky compact cracked like a door is cracked,
like a door in Bluebeard’s castle’s hacked
to dispassionate splinters nicked beyond velveted irons
at old Golgotha’s brutalist visitor’s center, a name
on the back of that compact cobbled and
itched in a chipping and blood-colored mud stain—
this cosmopolitan stench
of tepid Diet Coke digesting
half-sucked Marlboro cigarettes
in some stannic and stainless sac
that the tin man cracked
from a cleft in my father’s restive breastbone
or but the small of his back, depressed
to a gallstoned playa, a possum’s pouch
some litter of children had riddled with
gamboling stones-throws thrust to but scuttle down
back-hair broken up amongst shadows and sagebrush,
bud of a dread teratoma left
tucked in a tattersall collar and mordant remarks
he’d popped from a restless deadpan, things like,
“I’m like a fly,
every time I land,
I have to smoke.”
(The joke there followed a common thought
that every time a fly should land,
it vomited, certain as rising tides.)
“You see these people
walking around here?
Look at them.
Every single one of them
is miserable,” he
rasped in line at the Dr. DeLillo’s
cramped and dandruffed supermercado,
a clamshell crimped around cream horns
clutched in his arm with a carton of Tab
and a packet of whimsically simpering baseball cards
entombed in that crinkly foil that Wonka’s people used to—so
what siren’s song delights
in Marlboro Lights snuffed softly
tarnishing diet cola, nursing a dulcet ulcer,
luring the scrier’s marble forth
to but buff and rebuff in the crook of a cat’s eye,
green as envy, asparagus, salt-throttled copper,
a penny uncurled from a crepitant clot of lint
discovered come laundry day’s eve—————————
it spoke to me, Lincoln’s grainy and nasally gait
all jungle-gymed over my fusing freckles,
like strangling duck weed groaning ammonia brown,
like clown paint penned in upended permafrost:
(recalling the song of the spot resolutions
to both of those staticky Adams in animal heaven,
like M & Ms to a sniggering Quinlan,
Cronus and Saturn confused for adorably pot-bellied
twins)
“The sadness from her father’s eyes
was smudged like spoilt potatoes, struck
as a cat’s paw traces inching eternity
over and over their purled and
pensive pools impressed
by a godling’s steed,
by a glumly shuffling palfrey
freed upon dewy and slippery
pastures cracked, Sonora reshaped
and steered by the rarest of rains;
old Horseshoe Dam or the hem of the Hellespont cramped
with a bloom of innumerous coke cans, bloated, golden
cigarette packages pressed to a condo
for bawdy Mnemosyne,
left still darning stockings for songsters, buskins maybe
blurring the stir between friend and fowl or fool and finicky father—
the water there’d gone opaque as a prattling cataract.”
The year embroidered on Abraham’s homely collar,
‘64 or ‘88, it was hard to see beneath
greenly snickering laundromat ballasts and
wheezing machines swept
up in their clumsily fly-eyed cycles.
I could
feel it though, with the bridge of my nose,
a nose supposedly stolen clean from my father’s
side, though who really measured it?
I found
four cigarette stubs
I’d sown across squalid pockets,
clung among musty gums of dryer 93 or 94,
the year of the gay divorce, when tuna fish
ceased to tousle and muzzle the backs
of bristling bowls and cupboards,
when one lithe, juvenile tuna teased its
nose though a nettling dredge
of rusalki dander.
“Your mother
was like a fisherman, and I was
like a fish, and she stuck her rusty
hook in my back, then
gave me a good look
over, and, on a lark perhaps,
the hook in my back still,
threw me right back into the river.”
His father had loved to fish.
He tried to teach me.
He smoked Marlboro Mediums,
red as the flesh of a cartoon butcher.
I’d always loved their sense of humor.
I decided to pick up smoking
as a joke, at twenty-six,
in the shoals of a playskool divorce
across moldering paddocks and mountainous sentries,
and learned these figures three:
a) there’s a reason it (cigarettes) came to me (clearly).
b) I swore I’d smoke for a year, I’m thirty-four now, never swear.
c) what distinguished a Marlboro Light, it seemed,
(from anything maybe)
was simply a vaguely perforate filter.
I took a little trip down the river with Yolanda, summer of 1962
We hooted into Maysville on the Avalon
The big paddle wheel back churned mud and silt
The stacks belched black coal smoke and red hot cinders
Steam engines shook the floor boards
Down came the stage fast, calliope played My Old Kentucky Home
We went out on the port promenade deck to watch
Cargo went off, cargo came on. The pilot came ’round
“One half hour folks, thirty minutes and we go, one half hour.”
Roller blinds pulled down to soften the harsh August sunset
The soft glow of old carved walnut
The plank floor lightly dusted for dancing
Screwed down tables all up and down the bowed rail of the cabin
It was a pleasantly shaded breezy evening
Smell of river coming in the open windows
At our table for dinner, craw daddies, greasy greens and potato chips
Nick Clooney on the TV behind the bar doing the WLW news
River characters sitting all around passing the time of travel
Next morning heat and noise pulled me from my stateroom bunk
We were moored on the Kentucky side under the Suspension Bridge
The public landing on the other side was jammed with boat traffic
The River Queen nosed up to the cobble stones, big wheel slowly churning
Coal barges stuffed in all around her
The noise was deafening from the bridge right over head
Busses and trucks rumbling over the wooden floor
The river was slick and rainbow shiney from oil slurry
High up on Price Hill a little to the west
I could see the statue of Jesus painted white
And at his feet the billboard, “Impeach Earl Warren”
Later that night the Avalon pulled out
Mighty big stink of coal smoke
Churned up mud bath from the stern wheel
She backed into the river and turned down stream
No hooting or calliope this time
We gathered speed quick with the currant and
Cincinnati was left behind
I watched it all from the fan tail
The cruise to Louisville was fast, high river no traffic
We were there by dawn
Since the Writer’s Guild went on strike
my dreamscapes sorely lack pizzazz.
Episode 1:
The spy dressed all in white picked at his black hatband and adjusted his dark glasses, then pushed the button that launches the mini-missile towards the spy all dressed in black with a white hatband and dark glasses who calmly used his newspaper like a matador’s cape and pirouettes so that the rocket passes him by, blowing me up the alley and into dusty death. They remove their dark glasses and have matching eyes.
See? I told you.
Episode 2:
The sage wizard’s eyes widened as the hobbit flipped the ring from the fireplace towards him. “Bilbo can fix his own damn problems.” After deftly catching the ring and sliding it on Gandalf started flying, thinking impure thoughts about Galadriel. From my perspective as the ring, I only feel rejected and used.
Gets worse.
Episode 3
The Tyrannosaurus family, seated around the dinner table, complained that their short forearms couldn’t pass the bowl of me around the table. Sauteed to perfection, I can only wait while they work it out.
After waking up three times tonight,
it’s obvious that someone needs to pay the damn writers
so we can get some sleep.
Two Pale Lobelia grow
that moment, when
sleep begins her retreat
and I become aware of
small movements in my body
and my eyebrows begin to rise,
trying to convince my eyelids
to open for business,
when I begin to
thoughtlessly engage my mouth
in instinctual warm-ups
in anticipation of food, and
my toes wiggle to say
we are still here—
now get those legs moving
and I adjust my covers
and ponder a return
to sleep and I realize
I’m making some sounds,
not quite snoring, carryovers
from dreams, not yet
human language,
when the neighborhood
birds sound off in celebration
of the sun, and the hopeful
glow from the top of my curtains
greets my squinting eyes, then
comes the moment of decision–
to wake up, rise, and enter this
other
