Slant Six - Erin Belieu

Скачать книгу

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?

      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 as the tongue of mercury

      at the thermometer’s tip.

      But let’s admit there’s a pleasure, too,

      in living as we do,

      like three-strike felons who smile

      for the security cameras,

      like love’s first responders,

      stuffing our kits with enhancement

      pills, Zig-Zags, and Powerball cards.

      I read: to greet is the cognate for

      regret, to weep, but welcome

      our weeping,

      because we “grant the name of love

      to something less than love,”

      because we all have to eat.

      is another thing Nietzsche said

      that hits me as pretty specious,

      while sitting in my car in the Costco

      parking lot, listening to the Ballet

      mécanique of metal buggies shrieking,

      as each super, singular, and self-contained

      wisdom of this Monday morning rumbles

      its jumbo packs of toilet paper and Diet Coke

      up the sidewalk. So count me a Despiser

      of the Body, though I didn’t generate this

      woe any more than the little man parked

      next to me, now attempting the descent from

      his giant truck, behemoth whose Hemi roars

      like a melting reactor and stands

      as the ego’s corrective to the base methods

      by which the body lets the spirit down.

      Buzz-clipped, tidy as an otter, he’s high and

      tight in his riding heels. Pearl snaps on

      the little man’s shirt throw tiny lasers

      when he passes. But who isn’t more war

      than peace? And how ridiculous to suffer

      this: to be a little man, with itty hands

      and bitty feet, to know yourself lethal, but

      Krazy Glued for life to the most laughable

      engine. Recycled, rewired, product of

      genes and whatever our mamas thought

      to smoke: the spirit gets no vote, Fred.

      My body once was whole, symmetrical, was

      actually

Скачать книгу