TANGLETOWN

 

I like best walking these twisting roads

alone, the evening just beginning

to settle in, cars cooling along the curbs,

a few lights on here and there.

I like best getting lost when it's still

somehow a choice, one unexpected turn

leading imperceptibly to the next,

where I can think or not think,

carry my ghosts on either shoulder

without the slightest exertion.

I like best to hear the grasses exhale,

the leaves perform their fan dance

against a shifting cobalt sky,

breathe the fleeting breath of lilac,

their delicate wonder already receding.

I read the pictographs that the kids

have left upon the sidewalks,

small messages of hope and whimsy

more dependable than the street signs,

which seem to point randomly

into trees, yards, and roundabouts.

I have come to appreciate the beauty

of this unknowing, where almost

any path can bring you unexpectedly

home -- which is to say, right back

here, where you started from.

DAYS OF SINGING

 

In those days, everyone seemed

to be singing. My mother sang the old

country hymns, the simple notes

from her guitar ringing clear and warm,

the mystery of words casting its first spell.

We all sang in church, even those

of us who could not, our thin Midwest

voices graciously lifted by those

whose joyful noisemaking rose to the rafters.

We sang at school to remember

the names of states and presidents,

invented name-songs for the pretty girls

we were still too shy to speak to.

We sang to pass the time, to count the miles

on field trips, and the long, dull drives

in our family's failing station wagons.

We sang in grocery stores and restaurants,

the teenage waiter, surely underpaid,

singing as he brought you your slice of

birthday cake, sparkling proudly with light.

The radio and television gave to us

a seemingly endless variety of jingles,

the housewives, children, and store clerks

filled with sudden musical wonder

brought on by new detergents,

deodorants, and breakfast cereals.

Nearly everything, it seemed, was worth

singing about. And everyone hummed along.

I don't know when the singing stopped,

or if any of us noticed. We had lives,

jobs, worries that we held close in silence.

But these days much of my life is again

narrated in song, measured out

by a spirited daughter, who praises

the sun and the rain without question,

who conjures goblins in hushed, lower tones,

sings the months of the year in Spanish,

and offers a silly rhyme up for her old man.

"Dad, do you like my song?," she asks

from the other room, knowing my reply

in advance; and I call back to her, from what

suddenly feels like a distance of years,

"Yes! Let me hear it one more time."

THE HAT

 

Today the wind rushes up, seemingly

from the other side of the world,

not even tired from the journey,

barely pausing to consider the withered

leaves from last fall, or the plastic

chairs it tosses to the littered sidewalk;

it takes your favorite hat without apology

as if in celebration of itself, drags it

through the grocery store parking lot,

slowing just long enough to keep

you chasing, your hat turning and tumbling

mindlessly out into the busy street,

as you continue to follow, the world

around you fading, your awkward body

bent low to the ground, arms

reaching out for this one small thing,

one small piece of familiar, that you

suddenly fear you may never touch again.

BALLET CLASS ABOVE FRATTALLONE'S HARDWARE STORE

 

Copper pans and kettles rattle

beneath the clamor of dancer's feet,

a measured stampede rising

and falling, seemingly directionless,

from a distance we cannot quite fathom.

Step into the warm summer afternoon

and you can hear the upright piano

plunking out the same five or six notes

through the large open windows,

emphatic and out of tune, demanding

grace as if it were simply a matter

of mathematics, the seemingly endless

counting of steps and motion,

breathe and leap, and breathe again.

Look up and you can just make out

the arms of the young students,

reaching out like thin new branches,

then joining together above their heads

like a dozen orbs of sunlight

held against the dusty window glass.

We applaud from the white sidewalk below,

continuing in our separate directions;

our own steps for a moment somehow

lighter, our shoulders held back

as if by an unseen hand, blood-warm,

familiar, gentle as the breeze.

JUNK DRAWER

 

How it never yielded easily,

always jammed, always pulling

stubbornly to one side;

how it measured in its way

the insistence of your curiosity.

How it never seemed

to be full, always accepted

more and more, making room

within its shallow walls

for another stack of coupons,

restaurant matchbooks,

the padlocks without keys.

How you rarely found

whatever it was you were

searching for, there among

the spools of thread, the nails

and tape and bric-a-brac,

the random broken fixtures

and wires, toys and gadgets that

no one could now remember.

How it accepted your small hand,

fumbling blindly, making space

among the lost and forgotten.

How you inevitably walked away

with something, something

you did not know the name of,

something whose only purpose

in that moment was to be held

and carried at your side,

a thing of wonder once again.

ELVIS PRESLEY: JUNE 21, 1977

 

He knows, I think, that he is dying; suspects that we too know. We do, we do, all of us somehow believing that we are the only ones. All of us not wanting to know. His words stumble over themselves, rushing out, irrespective of order. His breathing is labored, uneven, sweat dangling from eyes grown distant as blue sky. But he smiles all the while, as if amazed to be here at all. He finds his way to the piano, fumbles for just the right tempo, starting fast, then pulling back. He finds the keys; or, more correctly, they find him. And in the pause before he begins, all else fades away. In this hush and this light, he is again that boy at the upright piano, singing gospel in the family room late into the night; singing whether others listened or not. Light years from this blue-lit stage, from this man so famous that we all believe we know him, so famous that the man himself has all but disappeared. He is hitting notes now that surprise even him, pulling them from some secret place he had nearly forgotten. He turns and smiles at the band, hovering between disbelief and absolute assuredness. He saves the best for last, sends it to the rafters, knowing something greater than himself has lifted it there. He stands and walks calmly, confidently toward a spotlight at the center of the stage. But the last note still lingers. And we want it to stay there, filling the spaces between us. We don't want him ever to arrive.

NUMBERS

 

How many years, brother, since the world of our birth stamped us and walked away? How can it be the year of your death again, so soon? As your dates fade, so do my own; the line between those dates the smallest bridge we'll ever hope to cross. Your place of address likewise has disappeared, along with telephone, labor union, and social security numbers; the baseball statistics you mapped meticulously when we were kids. What good are such figures now, and what good the weight and measurements of the body? Every number fades, every combination cancelling the other, until all that remains is an empty circle leading back and back to the inscrutable, singular You.