Poem: A world of trouble

A world of trouble

 

Patrick T. Reardon

 

 

“You are also asking me questions and I hear you,

I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out

for yourself.” — “Song of Myself,” 46, Walt Whitman

 

 

DAWN

 

 

The church girls in McDonald’s snack,

wearing their hair long, a tame wild,

a stretch past doctrine,

wearing their hair down the front of

long pastel dresses to touch

untouched breasts.

 

The church girls ignore the two

women lovers at the table in the

corner, leaning eye to eye,

then, standing, in their black fashion

common, muscular wrists.

 

And the powder blue dress girl sees

the bare midriff of one and sees

in the brash navel a cavernous mystery

of joyous comedies and bitter comedies unboundaried.

 

The bus arrives.

 

*

 

The whirlwind shut

up the whining man

who was innocent,

stormed silent the complaints,

left him breathless in the roil and rubble.

 

The man who opened the door

to a messenger — maybe an angel —

in the house by the bridge of twenty arches

across the street from the Half Mystic Saloon

on the Avenue of the Buffoons,

amid cataclysm churn and stumble,

fevered and faulty, on unsure soil.

 

Jarvis. Granville. Thorndale.

Argyle. Wilson. Fullerton.

Grand. Harrison. Cermak. Garfield.

 

The young old.  The middle old.  The old.

A ruined piece of atom.

 

*

 

I jump the stone wall,

blunder the shadowed land, spirit of dust.

 

Above, the urgent buzzard.

 

How many germs on the kiosk? So

many fingers.

 

The dance of germs

down the aisles and out to

42nd and shuffle off to Buffalo.

 

I’m young.  And healthy.

 

 

…

 

 

NOON

 

 

Whirling horsemen fell upon his

plowing oxen and feeding asses

and rustled them away. His laborers

knew sword’s edge.  Fire pounded like

rain on his sheep and shepherds.

 

I only escaped, a hireling.

 

Ever after, I hid in the liberties,

knowing to cross the line risked execution.

I breathed the air of the lawless place.

Kept my head down.

 

*

 

Boy bishops and little girl admirals,

twins, a double-play combo,

triplets, the outfield,

a pope in the crib.

 

*

 

Her portrait now in the collection

of the long-dead steel man

— sinned against miners, pleasured the refined —

signs of power usually male,

gems and hunt dog, monarchs

and a hand-wrote paper of the rights

of you and me from an Addison play.

 

Her smile.

Takes no guff.

Comfortable in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.

 

*

 

Robinson and Doby were followed by Hank

Thomson, Dan Bankhead, Luke Easter, Sam

Jethroe and Suitcase Harry Simpson, also

known as Goody.

 

 

Smith was followed by Maurine

Neuberger, Nancy Kassebaum, Paula

Hawkins, Barbara Mikulski and Dianne

Feinstein.

 

Brooks was followed, twenty years

later, by Charles Gordone, James Alan

McPherson, August Wilson, Rita

Dove and Toni Morrison.

 

 

*

 

Sommed, under indifferent shells.

Auschwitzed, under cold cog steel set in motion

for ambition, indifference and rot hate.

 

Shakespeare’s field sports and hunting,

the Wife, bookish bawd brash.

 

A prophecy that Merlin will make,

a vision Elijah will have,

a cooling that will take place

on the molten surface of the planet,

a bang that will boom.

 

Awaking each sunlight to a day of the dead,

the formula with zero at the end,

a long zero,

a long nothing.

 

*

 

In an upper room, someone put the

war poems next to the angry love

poems. A world of trouble.

 

Blessed are the silly God-clowns.

 

*

 

I taste the dust of the ranch and

the smoke of the hill

still as I sit here and

listen to sweating congressmen.

 

I feel the bruise of the bullet,

the slam of it

into the folded speech, an armor of words.

 

I see her sometimes in

the corners of mirrors.

I see her dead and smell

the room.

 

Part of me is watery and dark,

unspeakable, and filled with

tinny echoes.

 

*

 

Because the doors were locked,

Tillie Kupferschmidt died.

 

Because the fire killed Kate Leone, 14,

the building once owned by Triangle Shirtwaist Company,

a landmark.

 

Fire killed.  Smoke killed.

Leaping from the 8^th, 9^th and 10^th floors killed.

 

*

 

The wolf-like dog minces across the street,

well-trained or well-blooded,

too delicate for city pavement,

too handsome.

 

Planet atoms.

 

Underwater writing.

 

*

 

The man who was innocent reaped

boils, a worm erupted, a maggot

wiggled out of pus and into fresh air

from his nostril.

 

He could not help but

squirm, unlike the stolid

vestryman and righteous

burgomaster who, in warm

coats and comfortable shoes,

never squirm at all.

 

He squirmed but stayed.

 

Crowd drums north

over Chicago River bridge, quick as a twitch.

I counterpoint south, cleaving the bodies

like a Berwyn battleship bungalow,

purple-bricked.

 

You can get there from here.

 

 

…

 

 

DUSK

 

 

Young, David was no humble shepherd

boy. Later, he lusted and sent Uriah to

the front with expected results.

 

He sang praise and guilt. He was a

sinner and never denied it.

 

He knew the bleak white of the formless

empty at the center of his chest and

knew his fierce thirst to fill it with the

LORD or, less fearful, a passing delight that

clinked tintinnabulating inside the

cave of his soul.

 

*

 

Hear and determine

treasons, felonies and misdemeanors.

Give testimony.

 

Useless names on an arch.

Useless bodies stacked.

Can’t unrot the apple.

 

Brew of squirrel bark.

Glimmer common glow worm, stardust.

It had to be you.

 

Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.

Chicago, Detroit and Canada

Grand Trunk Junction Railroad.

Soo Line.

 

 

*

 

Down the street, a noise of chanting choristers

wandered from window to window in the evening light,

singing for pennies and the chance to ride the notes.

 

At Blackmonks Ford, night came early.

Little Sister slept and knew the movement

of dangerous animals.  The nose is always awake.

 

Brother Elbow stirs uneasily in sleep.

 

A New Jerusalem.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

 

This poem was originally published in my collection Every Marred Thing: A Time in America, from Lavender Ink.