for dreaming
and art is still our only flying car,
but I can’t recall when anticipation
became the substitute for hope.
Recently, C. said, “Now we begin
the poems of our Great Middle Period.”
I imagine digging a series of small
holes, burying poems in Ziploc
baggies. I imagine them as baby teeth
knocked from the present’s mouth.
SOMEONE ASKS, WHAT MAKES THIS POEM AMERICAN?
And I answer by driving around, which seems
to me the most American of activities, up there
with waving the incendiary dandelion of sparklers
or eating potato salad with green specks of relish,
the German kind, salad of immigrants, of all
the strange, pickled things we carry
over from other places, like we did on Easter
mornings in Nebraska, stuffing our Sunday
shoes full of straw so that either Jesus
or the Easter Bunny could leave us small,
bullet-shaped candies in honor of what, I was
never quite sure. Where do such customs
come from? Everywhere!
Americanness is everywhere,
wedged into everything, is best when driving
around a frowsy Gulf Coast city with its terrific
mini-marts like Bill’s, the very best of all marts!
UN of toasted boat rats and boys from the projects
revving their hoopties; of biscuit-shaped ladies who
penny their scratch cards and hold up the line;
where Panama (from Panama) commands
the counter, and Mr. Bud, the camel-faced man,
offers every kid a sweetie, producing a jar
of petrified lollies from a shelf also
displaying an array of swirly glassed pipes
and Arthurian bongs, where Raul the Enforcer
idles at the back, packing since the incident
in the parking lot last summer.
Of course, people
here have their discontents: the artists save
what tips they don’t snort and always mean
to leave for New York or Seattle, though I tell
them both drizzle like November half the time.
So I say, No! That’s un-American. We need
our artists everywhere, not scrunched up
in one or two rarefied spots,
which makes their parties anxious. And Miłosz
says artists come from everywhere, from everyplace,
the capital and the provinces, to keep
the body healthy or else end up like 17th-
century Hapsburgs or German shepherds
listing with hip dysplasia. So I’m circling
the swampy taint of this Southern city, choosing
art, choosing to be American, actively pursuing
that fabled happiness when the alternatives
present themselves, which is my obligation,
both legislator and witness to Bill’s
Mini-Mart and Mike’s Chinese Grocery,
and the hungry citizens queuing up
in front of Jenny’s Lunchbox, waiting
on line for a pile of cheese grits to start
this day, placing them firmly for the moment
in the happiness column. Because what’s more
American than a full stomach on a sunny morning?
What more than this fat-assed acceleration,
driving with the windows cranked down?
LOVE IS NOT AN EMERGENCY
More like weather, that is,
ubiquitous, true
or false spring—the ambivalence
we have
for any picnic—
flies ass-up in the Jell-O,
the soft bulge of thunderheads.
Right now, the man in the booth
next to me
at the Nautilus Diner,
Madison, New Jersey,
is crying, but looks up
to order their famous disco fries.
So the world’s saddest thing shakes you
like a Magic 8 Ball;
and before him, the minstrel
who smeared on love’s blackface, rattling
his damage like a tambourine.
I have been the deadest nag
limping circles round
the paddock, have flown to beady pieces,
sick
