Mar

The Guidance Counselor

He got his degree and then a job, counseling
students on their futures. He’d see them for
fifteen minutes at a time, juniors and seniors,
all day long. On their way out of the little town
he’d come back to. He’d gone twenty-five miles
away and no further. He only spoke to the
best and the brightest; the vocational kids

weren’t going anywhere, the middle of the
class would end up like him. It was the
college prep kids whose parents pushed
them to him, to make sure they were taking
the right courses, getting involved in the
right activities. He made sure they looked
good on paper, where it counted.

At home, his own kids were out of control;
they smoked, they drank, they let their hair grow.
They talked back to him. His wife said
she could do nothing with them. And so as he
guided the good kids down the chute towards
prosperity and respectability,
his own slipped behind the point he’d worked

so hard to reach: a home in town, nothing much,
but respectable. Each day he’d stare into the eyes
of the children who’d been raised right; each night
he’d return home to find his wife smoking a cigarette
over a frying pan, cooking hamburgers, with no idea
where his boys were or when they’d be back. He
knew they weren’t playing sports, they’d given that

up long ago. He suspected they were hanging out
at the drive-in, drinking Cokes and wasting time, not
making anything of themselves as he had, coming
from nothing—a farm north of town—and going off
to college to get a white-collar job. No, they had the
work ethic of their mother; she’d latched on to him
as the girl he knew at home, the one he could always

depend on being there when he drove back from college.
One day as he finished up at school he gazed long into the
eyes of a boy who was going to college back east; a math
genius, his father a doctor. Why couldn’t my boys be like
that, he almost said aloud as he ushered the boy out his wood
and frosted glass office door. Then he went home,
as if in a daze, opened up the back door and found his wife

smoking, as usual. He opened up the knife drawer, took one
out and said “C’mon—upstairs.” She didn’t believe him at
first, thought he was kidding, but he backed her out of the
kitchen, up to the second floor where the boys’ bedroom was.
There he kept her until the kids came home, trooped upstairs
and ran past him into the room to find her sitting on the floor,
leaning against the wall. Their father told them to sit down next

to her; they were all going to stay there for a good long time
until they’d changed their attitude. The boys complained at
first but after a while realized that their father meant business;
the knife was real, and the look on his face was grim, determined.
“What do you want us to do?” one of the boys asked in a sharp tone.
“I want you to make something of yourselves,” he snapped.
“And you,”he snarled at his wife, “I want you to make something

out of them while I’m gone all day making something out of other
people’s kids.” The mother and the two boys sat nervously, not
moving, like dolls lined up on the floor, the sun from the west
spilling over their shoulders. They stared across the room at the
father, who finally had to get up and relieve himself in the bathroom
down the hall. The elder boy climbed out a window quickly,
shinnied down a pole, and ran to the police station ten blocks away.

The police surrounded the house and the man came out with his hands
up over his head; he’d dropped the knife when they told him to.
They put him away in the State Home of the Mentally Disturbed,
where he advised other inmates on career choices available to them.

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Feb

The Sporting Club

There had been a whore house at the spot for a century,
since the cowboys drove cattle up the Chisolm Trail to
town, to be loaded onto boxcars bound for the Chicago
stockyards. Scott Joplin probably played ragtime that
some of them heard, sitting in the parlor, while he dreamed
of more learned and genteel audiences for his operas.

A hundred years later the only music in the sporting house
was on a jukebox, whose lights shone red and blue, and
whose records exposed many a man—the club-footed,
hare-lipped farmers, men who could get a woman no other way
—to B.B. King and Bobby “Blue” Bland, James Brown.
The young kids and the high rollers knew those sounds.

There’d be dice in the room off the bar, with cries of “Fade me!”
when somebody thought he was getting hot. The girls would
lounge around, not much different than their great-great-great
grandmothers did. Every now and then a white kid would come in,
looking a little lost, trying to appear blasé, as if he’d seen it all
before. If he was smart he’d keep his mouth shut. That way he

wouldn’t pick up a social disease, or get knifed. If one of the black
kids asked for a loan, you knew you’d never see that money again;
it was the price of admission to this nether world, far removed from
the shining sinks and order of home. Sometimes there’d be posturing,
young bucks and old bulls. Zack, the owner, knew what was good
for business. “Keep it cool, everybody,” he’d say. “Don’t nobody

want no trouble. You need to get outside in the night air and chill out,
you hear?” He’d usher one–jawing over his shoulder at the other—
out the door. One night it was Zack himself who got into it with one of the Patton
boys, Lester, the younger of two. The one with the quick smile, who’d
been All-Conference in football. He’d hung around town to take courses
at the junior college, trying to get himself a scholarship to a football school.

Lester was out for a little fun and was fooling around with one of the girls.
Zack told him to cut it out, but Lester knew the girl from way back. “She
can take it,” Lester said. “I said cut it out,” Zack said, and Lester said “I heard ya.”
He figured since he could bench press a man Zack’s size,
he could handle him. “Then cut it out or git the hell out of my place,”
Zack said. “I’ll go when I’m damn good and ready,” Lester said, and

Zack had a knife out before the breath was off his lips. “You feel froggy,
just leap,” Zack said. “Ain’t no fence around my ass.” “You’re an
old fool,” Lester said, laughing. “I may be an old fool, but I can handle a
damn fool like you any day of the week. Git outta here.”
Lester said “I’m goin’, don’t worry,” and put his hands up in the air,
as if to show he was submitting to
the older man’s will, but as he passed, he grabbed for the knife. There was a

scuffle, and the knife flashed light against brown skin, and red blood flowed.
Lester went down, still struggling, while players headed for the door, as if the place
was on fire. The girls came out in various states of undress and ran to their homes.
One needed the money so bad, she propositioned a boy in an ice truck headed across
the tracks to the poultry processing plant. Zack knew they’d find him, so he didn’t
run. He sat down at the bar and ordered blackberry brandy and a beer, his usual.

Zack got himself a lawyer, who tried to argue that Lester started the fight, that it was
his knife. The hare-lipped farmer testified; the jury had trouble understanding him,
but they believed him. He’d seen the whole thing, sitting in a chair with a girl on
his lap. He didn’t want to testify, but the county prosecutor knew where to find him
too, and knew he was a regular. He knew he’d probably been there that night.
After Zack was convicted, the farmer cried, saying “Where am I gonna get laid now?”

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Feb

The Jewish Mayor

He was the mayor of a town where most people didn’t know what a Jew was,
   had never seen one that they knew of, and certainly hadn’t met one before.
All they knew was what they read in the Bible, you could have said,
   and so none of the old animosities and prejudices applied. Had anyone
   ever heard the phrase before, they would have said “He’s one white Jew.”

But they hadn’t, way out on the prairie; a visit to the city was a special event
   that took the better part of the day. So he got along with everybody—he
   knew it was good for business, and kept his opinions to himself. The
   Chamber of Commerce men thought he was a Republican. Those who
   knew him socially assumed he was a Democrat. One year when both

   parties needed a candidate, they came and asked him to run for mayor.
He’d built up a little dry goods shop into a department store, one of just two
   in town. It didn’t have an escalator, like the Rose’s store down the street,
   but it had a second floor where he had a view of shoppers below as he
   kept the books, alongside racks of boys’ clothes, bath towels and notions.

His name had never been attached to any scandal or embarrassment. Oh, his
   daughter Rachel had been sent home from school one time with a note from her
   Social Studies teacher. She’d written a report about Ruth and Boaz, how
   they’d slept together before they were married—“bundling” it was called—
   and so there was nothing wrong with it, kids should be allowed to do it

   as long as they were chaste, like the couple in the Bible. “I thought you
   would want to know about this,” the teacher wrote to the parents. “It
   caused quite a stir when Rachel read it in class, and I sent her to the
   principal’s office.” The father read the report and the note, smiled, and
   allowed himself a little laugh. “If it’s in the Bible, it must be okay,” he

   said. He turned the note over and wrote “Miss Killion: I agree with you. We
   have spoken to Rachel, and this will never happen again.” Sometimes, he told
   his daughter, you have to wear the mask–he had never done anything
   to draw attention to himself. He was absent from the store on Sabbath, when
   his assistant manager stood in for him, but no one thought anything of it;

    he was entitled to a Friday night and Saturday off, they thought, he works hard.
When the two parties came to him and asked him to run, he thought about it.
His name would get out there, that was free publicity, but he’d have to make tough
   decisions that were sure to make somebody angry at him, no matter which
   side of a question he chose. It was a little extra money, that would be nice to

   have, but not enough to make the aggravation worth the while. City Hall was
   right down the street from his store, however; it would be easy to pop over there
   when he had to, and zip right back. He talked to his wife, and she thought it
   would be a wonderful thing, to be the first Jewish mayor of the town, the only
   Jewish mayor for miles around, maybe even in the whole state. Why, even in

   New York they’d never had a Jewish mayor! And so he decided to run, as a
   Democrat, but the Republicans wished him well. He proposed a new sewage
   plant, that’s what the town needed to grow, he said. And a junior college—
   for the kids who couldn’t afford to take four years off from starting their lives,
   who couldn’t be spared by their parents from family farms and businesses.

He won—it wasn’t even close. Everyone thought he’d do a great job, they said
   “Look what he’s done with that business.” He was more admired than he’d
   ever suspected. It was a grand thing—people said hello he didn’t know, people
   congratulated him, told him he was made for bigger things, party leaders in
   the state capital took notice of him. This, in a town that didn’t have a minyan!

To be so respected, so admired—he wouldn’t toot his own horn, but his wife
   wrote to tell his family and hers, back east. “We are suddenly social
   butterflies,” she said, “much in demand, although to get into the country club
   I don’t hold my breath.” And he allowed himself a small measure of smug
   satisfaction. “Who’d a thunk it,” he said to himself. “Certainly not me.”

And yet, as he considered it from another angle, it was wasted glory. “Here,
   in this little one-horse town, what if my Ruth lies down with her Boaz,
   and gets up with child? Yes, the child will be Jewish, but a little putz,
   a zshlob.” He resolved that night to speak to his wife about birth control.

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Jan

Her Stars

Doretta taught eighth-grade English, and lived alone, a block
from the school. She was “Miss” Hay to everyone, and
even though the boys never thought twice about it, the
girls in her classes knew that meant she was an Old Maid,
a figure on a card in a game that you didn’t want to end up
holding in your hand. And so they knew she was something
they didn’t want to end up being, not if they could help it.

She would walk home each night to her little apartment,
grade papers for awhile, then make dinner for one or
maybe have another teacher over, either a spinster like herself
or a woman whose husband was out of town or who took
pity on her; an evening not unlike that of nearly every other
household in town, with or without a family, until night fell.
As others turned on their TVs, Doretta turned out the lights

and looked out her window at the stars—her stars!—which
had provided the human race with peaceful and sublime
entertainment for eons, since the Greeks and before. She
couldn’t understand why people would spend good,
hard-earned money on a television when they could look
up at the sky every night—for free!—and trace the images
that had inspired poets, that had transfixed astronomers

and physicists. The stars—that gave man a sense of how
insignificant he was, and yet how there was a grand design
to the universe. She counted herself fulfilled if, out of each
year’s eighth-graders, she could awaken a sense of wonder
at the heavens, if she could cause just one idle or errant
young boy to step outside at night and look up at the skies
and lose himself, as she did, in the infinity he beheld there.

When winter arrived she told her students to look for Orion,
the hunter, with his tri-starred belt and his sword and club.
With his two dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor, behind him,
and Taurus the bull advancing towards him, and Lepus the hare
escaping detection at his feet–that, she always hoped,
would interest the boys, who would sometimes come to class
sleepy-eyed from a night of coon hunting with their fathers.

And yet she was lucky to catch the fancy of even one of them.
The girls would dutifully hand in their reports, with neat drawings
of the constellations, but the boys were a different story.
Some would nod off in the late afternoon, others
would stare out the window, thinking of football or basketball practice—or girls.
Some would hand in nothing, others just a half-hearted stab at
the assignment—incomplete, illegible, incomprehensible.

One day walking home from school she noticed a bulldozer and
a truck on the lot next door to her building, where a small
home sat, fallen into disrepair. What, she wondered, was in store?
Each day as she passed she saw progress in the form of demolition,
then the lot cleared, then a concrete foundation, then a garish
hamburger restaurant—little more than a metal shack–rising
from the dust, its walls bright white and glass and shiny metal.

Then the lot was paved, and lines painted, and an enormous sign
erected. Well, she thought, it might be nice to drop in there at
night some time and pick up dinner instead of cooking.
Sometimes she was tired, and just wanted to close her
eyes at the end of the day before she turned them towards the
heavens. And so she waited for the grand opening, and decided
to treat herself to a hamburger and some French fries and a

milkshake the first night. She took the food up to her apartment
and ate them at her table and thought it wasn’t bad—
not something she’d do every night, but a nice break when
she didn’t want to cook. She finished and cleaned up
and, as usual, turned off the lights and took
her place at her window to look at the stars and saw—nothing.
The lights from drive-in and the sign had turned the sky above to a
milky white instead of a deep blue, and the stars—her stars—were gone.

From “Town Folk & Country People.”

118 days ago Short URL 4 Comments

The Taxidermist

He had been a hunter all of his life,
and so he learned how to skin animals,
and then how to stuff them. He got good
at it, and word of his skill spread.
Men who had shot bucks and foxes
sought him out. He made a few bucks
that way, enough to put himself through
school and get his teaching certificate.

When he reported for work the first week
to teach freshman biology, he got off on
the right foot with the kids; firm, but not
too stern. He tried to convince them that
cutting up worms and frogs was fun, if
you had the right attitude about it.
But they were mostly city kids, college prep
types, who’d never hunted in their lives.

The second month, October, he told them they
would be doing a leaf collection project.
He told them how they should preserve the leaves
in a cardboard box with wax paper in between
them, what kind of leaves they had to collect,
what the trees looked like. Some of the kids
looked bored, but for others it was a welcome
change from the chloroform and formaldehyde.

He was at home one Sunday, working in his
basement on a raccoon, molding it to a log,
when he began to feel light-headed. It was
as if he was in a dream, but awake. He went
out to his car and, as if controlled by forces
he couldn’t see, drove to Kansas City. There,
he had a hamburger at a drive-in, then drove
down into the heart of the city, and parked.

He began to walk around, not knowing what
he was looking for. As he wandered the
streets, he seemed to be watching a movie of
himself, not living his life. It was as if he
was the animal he was working on from on
high, outside of himself. He didn’t know
where the he who observed was located,
or what tools and chemicals he was using,

but he thought he had done a masterful job—so
lifelike, so realistic. He noticed that people were
looking at him as if he were in fact a well-stuffed
animal, and the man who had made him a real artist.
He would smile back at everyone who admired him,
happy to know he would probably win a prize if
he was entered in the Hobby Competition at the
Missouri State Fair—maybe even get a blue ribbon.

He wandered until he was so tired he had to lie down on
the sidewalk and fell asleep. When he woke up the
next morning, he emptied his pockets and bought a
fried egg sandwich and a cup of black coffee at a diner,
and continued to walk the streets of the city. This time,
it was as if everyone else were on display, and he was
walking the aisles to examine them in glass cases; a few
people returned his gaze with alarm, but he just passed on.

He emerged from the skin he’d been in to find himself in
a cell; his fingernails were long, and curled in on themselves.
He could see his hair without looking in a mirror; it hung in
matted strands in front of his face. He got food three times
a day and a place to sleep. Now he was back on display,
along with other human animals. There were very few
spectators, and they didn’t linger or look long. They would
stop in front of a cage and say “That’s him,” and one of the

other animals would be released to its owner. In just this fashion
his father appeared, grey and haggard, in front of his cage one
morning, and said “Yes, that’s my son.” They had opened up
the door and let him out, and his father had taken him away in
the Oldsmobile that his dad had said was the last car he’d ever buy.
He stayed at home for some time, cleaned up and made to stay
quiet in a chair while he recovered. Winter passed and then he
noticed green buds on the trees, and he understood it was spring.

His doctor came and examined him, and pronounced him fit to
return to the classroom. His students had had a succession of
substitute teachers, each one beginning where the kids told him
or her the last one had left off. They had all abandoned their leaf
collections except for one boy, an honor student, who’d been told
that he’d better not bring up the subject when the taxidermist came back.
His first day back he looked out at the class as he had looked at the
strangers on the streets of Kansas City—vacant and unfocused.

“Good morning,” he said. “I’m back. Where did we leave off?”
The students seemed to have glass eyes, like the animals he’d stuffed.

From “Town Folk & Country People.”

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Jan

The Intellectual and the Town Slut

Michael went off to college, and stayed away a long time.
He got one degree, then another, then another.
By the time he was through, he had more
than anyone else in town. What, folks asked his dad,
was he going to do with them?
He’s trying to find a teaching job somewhere,
his dad said, and from the look on his face you could

tell that the hunt hung heavy on the old man’s head.
They opened up a new junior college on the western edge of town,
something new, so kids wouldn’t have to pay for a dorm
or commute thirty miles just to get an education. It didn’t
look like much, just an extension of the fairgrounds, but
it was something a lot of folks were proud of, or felt
they were supposed to be proud of.

Why don’t you try to catch on out to the junior college?
his dad asked as Michael sat on the couch one day, reading
a paperback, smoking a cigarette. “Only as a last resort,”
Michael said. “I’ve got a lot of resumes out.” “Well, don’t
wait too long and pass up a chance,” his dad said. “I don’t think
it’ll be a problem,” Michael said. “I think they’ll take anybody
who can fog a mirror.” “Don’t get cocky,” his old man said.

By the time the fair started up Michael still hadn’t heard from
the places where he wanted to teach—far away. “You’d
better get an application in,” his dad said. “All right,” Michael
said, and drove out to the juco with a curriculum vitae. He
dropped it off at the dean’s office. “We could use somebody
to teach English and Writing,” the dean said, his short-sleeved
shirt billowing a bit from the window air conditioner behind him.

“When do you need to know?” Michael asked. “Next week,”
the dean said. “All right,” Michael said, and each day thereafter
he’d walk in dread down to the mailbox in fear that he wouldn’t
hear, or that he would. When he was down to his last day, he
met the mailman at the box. There was a letter, from a college
in Oregon. “We regret to inform you . . .” and so on, and so Michael
took the long drive, bitter with resignation, to the junior college.

His students were dull, but he liked having a little money in his pocket.
He started hanging out nights at a bar downtown, the Fireside Inn.
Every night he’d bring a book and sit and nurse a drink at the bar,
feeling a little superior, watching people come and go.
His new role amused him, and gratified him at the same time. He was one of the first
professors ever resident in the town—that was a distinction, however small,
and people seemed to look up to him, to consider him a curiosity.

He figured that he lent some air of distinction to a town sorely in need of it.
Some of the men he knew from the Country Club growing up would stop
by and ask what he was reading. Their wives were glad he’d come back
to town instead of leaving like so many of the others had.
Some of the female students would wave to him across the room, then
fawn over him and grow enthusiastic when he told them what he was reading.
He decided that while he didn’t want to stay, he was enjoying himself.

The owner of the bar—Pam—had inherited it when her father died.
She was trying to freshen the place up. She put in plants and
encouraged some of the local bands to work on their acts
so she could have live music. Learn a little something for everyone
she told them, and they did. Some country, some rock, “In the Mood”
for the old folks. Things were always slow to get going, but by the
third set, everyone would be up dancing until last call.

After a while, Michael thought, a wave of bohemia seemed to be
crashing over his little home town, and if he hadn’t started it all,
he was there at the beginning! He thought of putting out an
underground paper at the college, one that would satirize
small-town life and narrow-minded people. He’d sit and smile and look at the overfed couples
and think of how they wouldn’t even realize they were the butt of the joke.
He’d smile and sometimes couldn’t keep himself from laughing out loud.

One night, Michael said something to Pam at closing time, and she
gave him a gentle little push on the chest and told him to go home.
He wasn’t drunk, but she said he was, and that she’d call a cab for him
if he wanted. “No, I’m okay,” he said, and he drove to his apartment
thinking maybe he and Pam could—you know—have a fling.
He went to sleep that night thinking of her, how she was different
from the other women in town, someone he could talk to.

The next week, he was sitting in the student lounge talking to a couple
of kids who were in his classes. “What does an old guy like you do
for fun in this town?” one of them asked, and Michael told them he
liked to drink at The Fireside. The two boys looked at each other
with sly grins. “Another notch on Pam’s headboard,” one of them
said. Michael knew what that meant, and he didn’t want to appear
naïve. He composed himself, then–trying to sound jaded–he spoke:

“So Pam’s a wild one, huh?” he asked, as calmly as he could.
One of the kids looked around the lounge slowly, counting, his
lips moving while he smiled. “I count six guys here right now
who’ve slept with her, and it ain’t even lunch time,” he said.
Michael’s guts churned, and his face burned with an anger he
hadn’t felt in years. He wanted to hit the kid, but it had been
two decades since he’d been in a fight. His mind restrained

his heart, or rather undid it. “Yeah,” the other kid said. “She’s like
the town slut, and a cheap date, too. You drink her beer all
night, then sample the rest of the menu upstairs,” where she had
an apartment over the bar. Michael’s misery was deep, and his
temporary peace with the town and his life now undone. He
excused himself as breezily as he could, walked back to his office
and shut the door. The woman next door heard him kick something.

That night he took a seat at the bar and paced himself, drinking water,
then beer, laying off the hard stuff. He smiled at Pam from time to
time as she pulled the taps, biding his time, making small talk.
When it was last call, he ordered a tall boy, a sixteen-ounce
bottle of beer, and nursed it ‘til he was the last one in the place.
Finally, Pam said “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,”
the line she used when it was time to close the doors.

“But I want to stay here,” he said, trying to sound sensuous,
but coming off as pathetic. Pam look at him, surprised.
“Why?” she asked. “Are they painting your bed at home?”
she joked, assuming he was drunk and hoping he wouldn’t
turn mean. “No,” he said, narrowing his eyes, which he
trouble bringing in to focus. “I want you,” he said, as Pam
dried an Old Fashioned glass. “I want to sleep with you.”

What he didn’t say was this: You’ve slept with every other man
in town; I don’t understand why you wouldn’t sleep with me.

Pam was silent for a moment, and stopped drying.
“Well this is a surprise,” she said, in a tone that
suggested a school teacher who’s caught a
good boy smoking, not a woman who wants to make love.
“When did this crazy idea enter your head?” she asked;
“it’s the first I’ve heard of it.” Michael realized that
she didn’t share the feelings he’d had for her.

“Well,” he said, looking down. “I just thought it was
time I said something.” She looked at him skeptically;
“No, you just want to get laid, and I’m the last woman
standing,” Pam said. “Like the song says, ‘Don’t the
girls all look prettier at closin’ time.’” She turned around
and started drying again, hoping he’d get the message
and go away. He was too committed to his folly to move.

“I’m serious, Pam,” he said as she went about her business,
closing out the cash register, starting the dishwasher.
“You and me—we could be great together,” he said. “We’d
be the hippest couple in this two-bit town. It’d be cool.”
She turned around and looked at him as if he were some
4-H kid’s cow she was thinking of buying at auction:
a sad little scene that she weighed solely for its practical value.

Moments passed, their eyes locked, neither blinking, but
Michael flinched after a bit under the glare of her gaze.
“C’mon,” he said. “It’d be good—you’ll see.”
She seemed unconvinced. “I guess I might as well,”
she said. “It’s not like I haven’t done this before.”
She flipped off the lights, locked the front door, then
took him by the hand and led him upstairs to her room.

Michael stood there, still holding his last beer, while Pam
went about the business of preparing for love with the
same efficiency she displayed downstairs. “The bathroom’s
down the hall,” she said as she took off her blouse and
unhooked her bra before slipping into a nightgown.
Michael put his beer down, then excused himself.
He walked to the bathroom and closed the door behind himself.

He looked in the mirror, and thought “What in the hell am I
doing?” Then he smiled at himself, in admiration of his
enterprising spirit. “Some things are worth making a fool
of yourself for,” he thought. He rinsed out his mouth and
returned to the bedroom, where Pam was already under
the covers, looking for all the world as if they’d been married
for forty years. “Turn off the light switch on the wall,” she said.

They made love, not wonderfully but well enough. Michael
had enough beer in him to make him passionate, but not
enough to unman him. He rolled off of Pam, then lay there,
looking upwards in the dark, and tried to put together in
unspoken words what had happened. He was still breathing
heavily as the thought came to him: “My God—I could
write a novel about this!” Then he fell asleep.

After a while, Pam got up and went downstairs. She thought
she’d heard somebody trying to jimmy the back door lock.

From “Town Folk & Country People”

143 days ago Short URL Comments

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blank verse/prose poem

Dec

The Vegetable Man

He would come, pushing his cart before him,
up the street from his home across from the doctor’s office,
more than a half-mile away. His cart,
loaded down with vegetables he’d grown himself,
was as ramshackle as that house; the boards of both
were weathered and rough, like his face.

When he’d stop on our street, we the children
would look at him through screen doors with curiosity.
When we ventured out to take in the spectacle of
the man and his wagon, a grocery store on wheels,
we knew his life was different from ours inside,
air-conditioned, televisioned, mothered and at night, fathered.

Mom would open the door and we’d approach him gingerly.
He’d hug us against our wishes when we tried to get a better
look at his cart, his odor a mix of sweet and sour and stink
from sweat. He was dirty–we weren’t allowed to be.
She’d buy tomatoes, okra, sweet corn, and we’d go back inside.
At least he did something for his job, instead of sitting at a desk.

Some days we’d stay inside if mom didn’t need anything,
and the tedium of our summer days would be heavier for the lack
of him, even though we came to understand that he was odd.
“Why does he live in that old shack?” we asked.
“His children don’t take care of him,” mom said.
“His wife died, he’s all alone.”

And then one day, after mom told him through the screen
that she was fine for now, thanks, we went back to our
coloring books and dolls, only to hear the country girl,
minutes later, say “Ma’am, that Mr. Whitesell’s on the
front porch, relieving himself over the rail.”
Doors were slammed shut and locked around the house

and when dad got home that night, the horrible tale was told.
“I guess a man like him, walking the streets all day, he’s
gotta go somewhere.”
“But not on my . . .”
“I wasn’t finished. I agree.”
“So you’ll call him?”
“I don’t suppose he’s got a phone.
I’ll have to find him home or catch up to him
sometime on the street.”

Dad stopped down to the old man’s house
the next day, before going to work. He
found him in the back, weeding and hoeing.
“Mr. Whitesell . . .”
“Be careful where you step. That’s manure . . .”
“Mr. Whitesell, I spoke to my wife and we’d . . .”

“Them’s mighty nice kids you’ve got. That boy’s
the spit ‘n image of you.”
“Thank you. As I was saying . . .”
“ . . . and those girls are just as cute as peahens.”
“Mr. Whitesell, my wife has signed up for our
groceries to be delivered. We won’t need you anymore.”

“You can’t get good okra like I got at the supermarket,”
he said, “and I come by your way every day anyway
‘cause I call on the other houses.”
“Thanks, but we’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t stop
at our place anymore.”

There was silence, and the old man looked down
at the dirt he had tilled by hand. “You sure you won’t reconsider?
I hate to lose a good customer.”
“Thanks, but we’re all set for the foreseeable future.
Dad started to walk back to the car, and Whitesell called
after him: “I’ve got sweet corn comin’ in soon. Nice white
corn . . . none better. I’ll just stop by when it’s ready.”

Dad turned and walked up close again, so the neighbors and the
people walking into the doctor’s office wouldn’t hear.
“You don’t seem to understand. You’re not welcome on my
property anymore. No man who takes a piss off my porch would be.
If you so much as stop your damn cart at my curb again,
I’ll call the police and have you arrested.”

With that he turned and got in the red and white Oldsmobile
with the turquoise seat cushions we’d put in the back,
and drove off, grim-faced and annoyed, to the shoe plant.
The old man stood there and watched him go, then turned back
to the corn, which had been knee-high on the Fourth of July,
and now had light-yellow tassels, about to turn brown.

From “Town Folk & Country People.”

171 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

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blank verse/prose poem

Nov

The Unfinished House

There was, on the street where we lived, an unfinished house–
incomplete in ways you didn’t notice at first;
no stairs up the porch to the front door,
no walkway to the porch. The type of details
that were left undone let a person know that
tradesmen, visitors and strangers were not welcome.

Inside lived an old woman, or at least old to us kids.
We’d see her sometimes through the windows, which
had no curtains, or maybe in her car before she drove
into her garage, which opened into her house. You saw
about as much of her as somebody’s gin rummy hand held
close to the breast; in plain sight, but her back was turned.

Such a provocation to a gang of young boys, and yet
none of us had the guts or the callousness to
bother her enough to react to us. She had a chain-link
fence around her yard, all the way out to the property line
There was no gate, so none of us ever got any
closer to trick or treat, or to chase a ball.

The story our parents told us was that she’d figured
out a way to save money on her property taxes.
Until her house was finished, it was undeveloped
even though she slept there every night, and kept
a fire going in one fireplace all winter long.
She was shrewd, crazy like a fox, my mom said.

I don’t know who told me the other version of her life,
and which was true; that she had been engaged to be
married to a man more dashing and handsome than
she expected. That she had built the house with money
she’d inherited from her family, and that the money,
and not love, was the reason he was attracted to her.

The banns had been published, and they would move in
when they got back from their honeymoon, the
house would be finished by then. But something happened;
the man discovered he couldn’t live for money alone,
or maybe he found another woman just as rich
but prettier. Either way, he was gone.

And so the house stood there, unfinished, like the heart
she had built for him. She saved on taxes, yes,
but also on expenditures of emotion. She needed
nobody, and nobody needed her. She grew used to it
and, like an unused chimney that’s bricked over to
conserve heat, she was as cold and indifferent as stone.

From “Town Folk and Country People.”

179 days ago Short URL 3 Comments

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blank verse/poem/spinsters

Nov

The Crazed Woman Who Called on My Wedding Day

She was calling, she said, from the bowels
of a library on a college campus where
she hid each night and slept among the stacks.
She’d been living that way for years, moving on
when she was discovered to someplace else where
she would blend in with the scenery
and pass undetected among the young.

I heard her out. She’d reached my name after
running through the directory, alphabetically.
Apparently no one in the a’s or b’s or any of the c’s
before me had done so. It was a strange tale she told,
how she’d been cheated of her inheritance—
money her father had left her–by a trustee, distant
and cold, far off in California. She said she had
no money to live on, or even fight with, because of him.

I called the fellow, a reasonable sort.
He thanked me for my concern and the
attention I’d given his ward, but he said she was
off her drugs, the police had been alerted. They knew
she’d come East and were looking for her
but they hadn’t found her yet. There were too
many libraries for her to hide in in this City of Books,
a place such as Borges imagined where for every

rational line there were rows of senseless cacophony,
a library that was the universe, the librarians in suicidal
despair. I rolled over in bed to answer the phone
and heard her voice again, more desperate than before.
They were closing in, couldn’t I help?
She asked. What had the trustee said?
She wouldn’t say where she was—perhaps I’d turn her in.

I don’t recall exactly what I told her other than
to say I couldn’t help her that day; another woman
—the one who would become my wife—
awaited me at the church. She was not the sort who’d
tolerate a groom who’d dare to show up late
to his wedding and hers, and so I demurred.

You’ll have to try the next name on the list
I said. But you’re the only one who’s talked
to me yet, she said, and those words rang in my head
like overtones of plainsong, Gregorian chant echoing
in the chancel up to the apse, as I repeated my vows,
facing the light streaming through a stained-glass window
thinking of her disordered mind, which kept her running
as I prepared to settle down.

196 days ago Short URL 105 Comments

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blank verse/libraries/poem/poetry

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