Jane Hathaway 1985

She smokes the last cigarette of the day,
puts down her Jane Austen.
Another sore-feet day at the credit union,
returning to the apartment complex at Melrose
she shares with a handful of randy kids.

Too late, she appreciates the quixotic honor
of men like Clampett. The headline read:
Bodine, Heir to Fortune, Takes All to Chase.
Drysdale Ruined in smaller print, and she with him.

Drysdale lies at Forest Lawn, not at the bank now,
last in a line of unremarkable graves:
Granny, old age; Jed, city living;
Ellie May, drowned in the cement pond;
Drysdale, by the .38 he kept in his desk.
She saw him dead that afternoon, went to lunch
and never returned.

written about 2000, revised recently

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This is My Last Poem

because I’m sick of my own voice,
tired of selling you my life, nauseous
from listening to you (and me).
I’m exhausted from talking to God. Listen:

I just got off the phone. My friend’s latest
manic phase resulted in God talking back.
His mother said that “while this was delusional,
the religious experience was real.”
Excuse me, but I can’t tell the difference
any more. When my friend hung up I listened
to the dial tone for awhile.

first written around 2004. And no, it wasn’t.

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Direction

It was always such a lonely road
horses cars bicycles then in later years
mostly pickups and tractors
I never saw no one who wasn’t
from around here until

the people came with little screens on the windshield.
Slick sports cars eighteen wheelers
drivin’ hard to get somewhere else
I had one stop to walk up to my porch
laughing – is this the road to Destin?
you’ve got to be kidding, old man.

I said I didn’t know – I’d never been.

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@irene

She wasn’t famous until the storm came
and then she was resisting cashing in in hiding.
People she didn’t know complaining to her
instead of @god.

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Convenience

Years passed. I drove by that brick two-story store
somewhere between Demopolis and Camden.
One day I went inside. A pile of boxes on the floor,
Day’s Work tobacco strewn on shelving.

The old man at the plywood counter had a grudge
saved up against the day that I would come,
an unloved uncle criticizing roads I’d traveled;
a hand-lettered cardboard sign: CASH ONLY.

Still, it was somewhere. When I stop at a BP
I think of geometry learned years ago:
intersections at the bridge at I-20 and Hwy. 43
occupying no space, existing only in the abstract.

I agree to the terms of my cardholder agreement
made in the state of Michigan.
A clerk and I wait for a modem to awake in Texas.
Two ripples in a stream of commerce; neither here nor there.

I’ve edited it somewhat, but I first wrote this around 1998.

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A Few Calls About Death

My father at the breakfast table with Mom,
hanging up the phone: “Well, Dean is gone.”
My mother’s damn-you tears: how can you?

What else could he do? The time he called
to tell me about our friend who’d been
electrocuted, we were crossing the state line,
my wife and I, the young childless couple
heading back from vacation, and he said:
“There’s no good way to tell you this…”

Continue reading “A Few Calls About Death” →
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