Three Poems From Books I Read In Eugene While Working On A Poetry Unit

[Preface to American Noise]

Boxcars and electric guitars; ospreys, oceans, glaciers, coins; the whisper of the green corn kachina; the hard sell, the fast buck, casual traffic, nothing at all; nighthawks of the twenty-four-hour donut shops; maples enflamed by the sugars of autumn; aspens lilting sap yellow and viridian; concrete communion of the cloverleaves and interchanges; psalms; sorrow; gold mines, zydeco, alfalfa, 14th Street; sheets of rain across the hills of Antietam; weedy bundles of black-eyed Susans in the vacant lots of Baltimore; smell of eggs and bacon at Denny's, outside Flagstaff, 4 a.m.; bindle stiffs; broken glass; the solitary drifter; the sprinklers of suburbia; protest rallies, rocket launches, traffic jams, swap meets; the Home Shopping Network hawking cubic zirconium; song of the chainsaw and the crack of the bat; wheels of progress and mastery; tug boats, billboards, foghorns, folk songs; pinball machines and mechanical hearts; brave words spoken in ignorance; dance music from the Union Hall; knots of migrant workers like buoys among waves or beads in the green weave of strawberry fields around Watsonville; the faithful touched by tongues of flame in the Elvis cathedrals of Vegas; wildflowers and anthracite; smokestacks and sequoias; avenues of bowling alleys and flamingo tattoos; car alarms, windmills, wedding bells, the blues.

-Campbell McGrath

**

Sex Elegy

My lovers have vanished. I used to have many.
One moved to Boston and married a Japanese photographer.
Another became a famous actress. Another one, who for a long time
I mistakenly believed to be dead, now lives in Manhattan.

We used to know each other so intimately,
sucking and munching on each other, inserting,
penetrating, exploding. Becoming as one. Funky
smell of sweaty bodies. Clothes strewn on floor
and bed. Candles burning. Smoke of cigarettes and joints
curling up the bedroom atmosphere. Now we never touch,
barely talk. Some I have lost all contact with.

But memories of our pleasure together, my dears,
still play in my mind. My body can still feel your touch.
My tongue still remembers your taste.
Everything else I seem to have forgotten.
The present is the life insurance premium automatically
deducted from your paycheck, while the past burns
out of control in a vacant lot on the outskirts of town.

-Terence Winch

**

The Last Words of My English Grandmother

There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed--

Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,

Gimme something to eat--
They're starving me--
I'm all right I won't go
to the hospital. No, no, no

Give me something to eat
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well

you can do as you please.
She smiled, Yes
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please--

Oh, oh, oh! she cried
as the ambulance men lifted
her to the stretcher--
Is this what you call

making me comfortable?
By now her mind was clear--
Oh you think you're smart
you young people,

she said, but I'll tell you
you don't know anything.
Then we started.
On the way

we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,

What are all those
fuzzy-looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I'm tired
of them and rolled her head away.

-William Carlos Williams

I just posted an old draft that's incomplete.

Got back a couple hours ago from Crepes on Cole where I was grading SSJE essays answering the question "Can people be trusted to govern themselves?" Ran into Molly--another Berkeley English teacher--who was knitting and sharing pots of tea with her husband and two friends.

Since I haven't been posting, I'm wondering what to write now. I think the only thing I can do is just keep going as though I've been writing regularly. At this point anything in the past few months I've either dismissed as unimportant, or forgotten, or eroded smooth with so much reflection that it's not really interesting anymore.

Here's what I'm thinking about--writing. Reading my students' essays I see their minds working, struggling to organize the words. Now I'm trying to write with a lot of thoughts swirling in my head, none of which have a shape. There's an American folktale from the plains about a cowboy named Pecos Bill who rides a tornado until it dies down. That's what writing's about, riding the chaos in your body and wrestling it down into language. Except, like in the story, as soon as you tame it it's a dead tornado.

Umana left me a great message last night. He was eating a peanut butter sandwich, reading John Donne, Anthony Lane, and something for a class on modern Chinese history, and because of these things (except, as he clarified, the Chinese history) he thought to call me.

Brianna arrives tomorrow. Ugh, I've got soooooooo much grading to do. I'm looking forward to the assignment my classes turn in on Monday--one page scenes creating characters. I need to talk to Chade or Rick or Umana about more fiction-writing exercises.

I want to go here.