Essay and Poem

This essay, from my collection What’s the Story? was written after the younger, obtuser Bush was re-elected. And I thought HE was bad! The poem is from my most recent collection, What Shines.

American Dream, 2004

–for Marjan Strojan, after the second inauguration of George W. Bush

The literary symposium is over for the day. Wanting a bit of time to myself, I have come to this pleasant restaurant overlooking Lake Bled, that jewel of Slovenia.

The cuisine is also pleasant, somewhat Latin but something else too, which I can’t find language to describe. A stone church guards a distant bluff and another guards the water’s solitary island, which is in fact the only island in this small, lovely nation. I watch the wooden longboats full of tourists, rowed from abaft by men who lean and straighten, lean and straighten. It’s a graceful movement, dance-like.

Here on the terrace there’s actual dance: a woman singer, one man on Fender bass, another playing some sort of squeezebox, because there always seems to be a squeezebox in this part of the world. I suppose I’d call their music pleasant too. It finds some niche between exuberant techno-pop and the classical stuff derived from folksong, of which the middle-European composers have always been so fond.

There’s an old world melancholy here where I sit, for which I appear to be a sucker. The dancers mostly look thinner than they would in similar places back home. But then back home there are no similar places, really, no dancers who move as these do, with composure and flair at once. It’s suddenly easy to dream of bolting my dear country and moving to somewhere like this, leaving behind the relative absence of style and civilization, the maddeningly insular frame of mind that doesn’t even know there exists somewhere like this.

I’d flee all that stuff, like those muscle-bound trucks with their oversized U.S. flag decals and their shark-mouth grilles. I’d flee 24-ounce steaks, TVs that reach the ceiling at Wal-Mart or Target or Circuit City.

I had wanted solitude, but it’s likely I’m only lonely.

I have no local language. Yet I do have others. Maybe in time I’d make my way.

All at once, the three musicians play a different music, however awkwardly. The lake downhill remains a gemmy teardrop, and even through the tune I hear the gentle tong of the island’s bell. The boatmen lean and row as deftly as they did before the mist and the evening settled in. I look but I can’t see that slip of island.

First the band takes up “Last Date,” all sweet and sour pap– unless like me you remember King Curtis’s version on his soprano sax, glissandi flickering, wrenching. That tiny, hole-in-the-wall club. The late great King.

The trio slides unstopping into “Please Release Me.” The pretty singer would kill to be Ray Charles. She fails. Who wouldn’t?

I had those same two bluesy anthems in that same order on my big old pickup’s scratchy tape deck twenty years ago. My love and I, not quite man and wife yet, would creep after dark along the rut-and-gravel roads of our Vermont, notes spilling out the windows. Now I wonder if the thing we call coincidence is real? Be that as it may, I’m sick for home, which is what, if you look at its roots, nostalgia means.

We hung on each other close as summer air and sang along with those tunes. Deer peeled off our headlights, thick as mice, and August’s moon looked as huge as we could ever dream.

Standard Time

… skateboarding’s values have always appealed to those who consider themselves somewhat outside of society’s regular pace.

–GQ

We just got a photograph of a grandson, cherubic, at the local skate park.

His smile shows he’s pleased to have been adopted by the older so-called thrashers,

though he hasn’t yet learned like them to be tough as nails, or to look that way.

I’m not sure why I think of Buster,

except that his toughness is real. He too looks incongruously cherubic,

though I wouldn’t tell him that, and if I did, he might not know

what I meant. He also might not like my explanation, and then

I’d wish I had somewhere else to go,

and quickly. I passed him today. He was mowing a lawn. If he hadn’t been,

he might have been digging a grave or tuning his pickup or maybe splitting

some wealthier neighbor’s firewood for winter. I’ve never asked, of course,

but Buster– or so at least I’m guessing–

doesn’t consider himself a rebel, though he did quit the highway department

ten days before he’d have been entitled to a pension. He was that pissed off

at his foreman’s high-handed conduct, and I would certainly call that rebellion.

Buster’s face is weather-buffed,

which lessens the cherub effect, I grant you. The kid to our grandson’s right

has a skull tattoo on one arm, and barbed wire inked around his neck.

He shows a nasty expression. Whereas the bill of his hat points backward,

Buster’s bill points dead ahead.

I notice the scowling, tattooed thrasher is stripped to the waist, whereas Buster

as ever had on the shirt that laborers seem to wear all over:

collared, Army-surplus green, with blotches of sweat at his armpits

and on his back from shoulder to shoulder.

Buster, I think, embodies the meaning of what’s called eking out.

When I passed him this afternoon, the light was dying, because it’s November.

I know something better than I did at the age of those boarders, half-naked and surly,

let alone of my grandson– or even Buster:

that the cold comes on at a pace nobody can keep outside of forever,

and the darkness shows up early.