Songs Heard the Wrong Way
for Jennifer Buxton
Songs heard the wrong way are usually better,
braver and richer. "Sweet Home Alabama,"
for instance: my friend thinks they're "singin'
songs about the subway." Montgomery-to-Cullman
Underground. With its own radio station,
piping commuters wild earplay--the way
Michael Jackson's question transmutes
from "Do you wanna be starting something?"
up to "You wanna be a star? Then suffer."
Even Bob Dylan has and to use dull words.
Look at his Lyrics book--squat, weary adjectives
strewn through it. No one "split up on the docks
that night." They broke up, of course, on a night like
most others: "dark, sad," inadequate, landlocked,
hardly the end of the continent.
Look at the nouns!
Highway, heart, heartache, fire, love, car, forever,
disposable bicwords leaking through landfills,
do us what good?
We need alchemy, syllables
popwriters never intended, formed free
of the usual agony, brain's leap from "dark, sad"
to starswept docks reaching away
from the known world, stacked high with exotica,
glowing by light of a rock that, we know now,
only appears to rise or to grow or to gaze.
The Fondue Pirate
I overheard a guy who claimed his dad
(way back in fondue party days) would not
abide the time it took to fry each shred
of meat. He'd studied cheese and chocolate dip,
but--waiting for a tiny chunk of beef
to sizzle in its vat? A flat-out waste!
Too small, too dull, too still. So he embarked
on his career in fondue piracy.
He'd cruise the shores of conversations, spy
an almost deep-fried tidbit, and attack
by sidling to its owner, opening
his mouth, and calling forth some joke, some pun,
some captivating question. All the while
his fondue fork edged closer to the game.
Without once glancing at it, he slid steel
though oil, through bubbles, touched his prey, and eased
it down the other's tines. Jab. Tap. Munch. "Mm,"
he'd sigh, and grin, and, chewing, drift away.
Nobody ever called him on it--"Hey!
He stole my sausage!" They would grope inside
the bowl and look perplexed. Not piratized.
At least they'd had the chance to hear him talk
like that, to learn the words he used to charm
his listeneers into such astonishment
that they would let their grim utensils go.
Just having heard the story second-hand,
not knowing what he said, I still converse
more like a galley-crew. (Heave! "How's your cat?"
Heave! "Hot enough for you?") I've seen the pots
at yard sales, cracked, with taped-up cord. But where
are all the parties and the buccaneers?
A Bulletproof Poem
If you're going to any city--Burbank, Yuma,
or suburb or creekbank or trail--
be sure to take a bulletproof poem with you.
Make multiple copies. Wear them. Pass them around;
Include them with tips and panhandlers' change.
I'm not saying you won't get shot.
Lee Highway, 1950
Approaching Wytheville's boundary sign, although
the heat's so hard the bruise-blue mountains wobble,
the well-informed crank windows up, shut wings
and speed through town. They've heard how polio
broke out with summer here. Half-suffocating
already in the black car and her girdle,
one woman wraps a towel around the burden
of baby in her lap, to guard its face.
She tells her son to pull his cowherder
bandanna, knots a handkercheif in place
across her husband's muffled "thanks," then draws
her own red scarf down to block her mouth and nose.
Three red lights. The lap baby frets at each,
but unenthusiastically. Across
the boot-scuffed fabric of the wide back seat,
Rich scrambles from one window to the other
and spells out Main Street: Baptist, Umberger
Hardware, Grubb Drugs, Lutheran, Methodist,
The First Virginia Bank. The bank. His father
blooms for him, from a calm optometrist
to what he must be, masked as if they've made
their biggest heist, blown up the safe, sashayed
out to the car--a family of robbers,
all smug and sweating through their getaway
from Wytheville with its iron lungs and no cure.