1939, CEDAR RAPIDS

Walking, alone, from Franklin Junior High, an afternoon

I found, as if by chance, in the macadam road,

A ruby-throated grosbeak, dead and maggot-torn.

That morning, when I stoked the night-banked furnace,

On the basement floor, down on my haunches,

I read declarations of the wars from last week's papers.

The headlines buzzed like flies around my head and flies

Buzzed around the bird as I stooped down to look at death.

That day, in shop, I put the varnish on a boat I carved

And, further down the road, six blocks from home,

I saw some Bitter-Sweet, popped chrome and orange,

And knew my boat was named, first thing I ever made to name.

1943, ATLANTA

Down West Peachtree Street from where we lived

In the Alhambra Courts, toward town a block

or so, above the Esso station, I stepped off

A curb, glancing at a passing Pontiac coupe

Driven by a girl about my age. Love at seventeen:

Heartbreak comes and goes like autos passing

On a thoroughfare, but the rip-scars stay a quarter century.

1929, DES MOINES

A wrought-iron lamp with burnt-orange fringe

Moves down, alone, the front porch steps

At 52nd Street and Urbandale, toward the streetcar

Tracks. The first thing I remember is a thing

Displaced, to a horse-drawn moving van.

1952, CAMBRIDGE

Off Plimpton Street, in the nook to Apthorpe House

Underneath a spreading chestnut tree, underneath

The lilacs all in bloom, at night, woebegone

And stirring in the Spring, I kissed a boy, a blacksmith's son,

Fierce, like you would a woman. Get a woman,

Get a woman, get a woman if you can;

If you can't get a woman, get a Harvard man.

1931, DES MOINES

When Dad moved in with a man named Shadow and out

Of our house on Franklin street, for good, he left

Me, with the women. That day I stubbed my toe

On the door-sill of the sun-room and my whole foot

Swole. I was inconsolable, a little mother-

Fucker, in whose imagination I will my father

Back, to the family

Circle. Today, when I lose someone, by death,

Or torn friendship,

I am that same five-year-old again, lost, at an Iowa Fair,

So lost amid a crowd he cannot bring together,

He tells the nearest person I HAVE NO NAME.

1926, DES MOINES

On the eve of my birthday, a woman,

Forgetting who she was, cast forth

A child, a boy, more like a seventh rib,

A bone, than flesh and blood, enough

Like me to be my brother, enough like me

To be another son of man, caught for hours

By the head between her hips' slipped

Position, he was blue in the face when

Forceps pulled him out, unwilling. What

Could he do, when the air smashed his lungs,

But scream. The doctor bathed his clogged eyes

Until tears fell and then laid him aside the woman,

My mother, who gave him suck, comfort,

Trust, and all the warmth he had had inside

Her body. Imagine that. Imagine that.

1944, COLUMBIA

A cute midshipman, pledged to SAE,

With nothing on my mind but gunnery,

I took the turning flight of stairs, down

From the downtown club-house rented rooms

Into the Main Street of the Palmetto Capital.

Above me, a gigantic woman, marble,

Veiled in peau de soie, a presentiment

30 stories high, afflatus, the first touch

Of madness and first subject of my poetry.

1960, BOSTON

Two days, ten minutes, after my release

From a California sanitarium, back

In Boston, Cerletti-shocked and semi-sane,

I received, above Longfellow's bridge, across

The sky, up toward MIT, jewel-bedecked

And evergreen, a TV close-up Cowboy.

Six years

It took me to compose myself in poetry.

1981, SAN ANTONIO

Tired of poetry talk at the Associated Writing

Programs Conference at the St. Anthony Hotel,

With the toe-gout I woke up with this morning,

I hobble over to the Confederate Park across

Crockett Avenue, not yet green but budding

This late March overcast afternoon. Central

Is a sawed-off obelisk, topped by a Graycoat

(LEST WE FORGET) pointing up either to heaven

or, at least, to somewhere out of the park,

His musket at parade rest, his countenance

Worn away by the elements, 100 and 20 years.

I sit wondering if that Platonic gun

Shot some Union lad in the leg, amputated

Without ether, whom Whitman nursed, brought

Candy to, wrote home for, loved in his vatic way.

And Ginsberg, represented here by a 30 year old

Hippie down the line, slugging Thunderbird

From a brown bagged bottle, derelict except

For his bright red bandanna headband. O,

I do identify with that crippled albino

Pigeon flocking with the English sparrows

Around the crumbs thrown by an old TexMex

Beneath the wheels of a tampioned cannon

Anchored with chains in the sod. I

Have outlived the 60s, the 70s, I

Exist in the 80s. What has changed?

Four black boys drinking LITE the next

Bench over toss their empties straight

Into a barrel drum; the tattoo spells out

ILLITERATE, 100 and 20 years. I feel

Like a helpless Yankee schoolmarm, a rare

Bird plumed with morals and perversions.

But,

But for Whitman, Ginsberg, and the white pigeon,

There are no queers, here, in this park,

Or in Texas. Isn't that right, Bubba.

1959, LOS ANGELES

Jealous of her sister (my mother) my Aunt Ruth,

Perfumed and virgin, agreed to marry at 55

A drunk proposing by transcontinental telephone,

A widower twice over, her childhood beau.

I loved her, her many years of waiting,

Living in grandmother's house, reading the latest

Book-of-the-Month-Club selections nights, days

Typing policies for the Equitable Life Insurance

Company. Company for her, some nights I stayed

The night, nights of homemade fudge and chocolate

Creams from Fanny Farmer's.

O, tonight, my kids

Brought me a Millbrook Creme-Filled Chocolate Buddie,

My madeleine -- a gush of memories: Ruth

Taking me out to lunch on her lunch hour -- Devil's

Food cake and coffee; Ruth, beating a sauce pan

Full of Divinity; Ruth, amid the alien corn

Of Iowa, smelling like French flowers; Ruth,

Victorian like mother, offended by the shit

And fuck of her foul-mouthed, sawed off husband,

Gun collector and sponge who made off

With her Equitable Life Insurance funeral money,

For a binge, when she died of heart failure, in Los Angeles

And left her corpse for my mother to bury;

Ruth, becoming fudge in a grave.

1959, PARADISE

My great-grandmother's oldest daughter, my Great Aunt

Lillian, a travelling representative for the Yeoman Life

Insurance Company, always went first class,

Dressed to the teeth in the latest Paris fashions

Stitched at home on a wood-framed, foot-pedaled Singer

And sent postcards home sealed in blue-lined envelopes

Addressed in sweeping curlicued calligraphy. She had

Style and proved it when, at Christmas, she

Gave us kids, each, a polished silver dollar

Won at the tables in Vegas. She seemed younger

Than my mother, tall and straight Lilyflower,

Married again at sixty and retired to Paradise,

California, manager of a first class nut farm.

It was to her I wanted to take my bride

From Palo Alto, to the oldest living woman

Of my tribe; but two days, ten hours, before the trip

I and my car broke down. I in a nut house

And Lillian died eighty miles and years away in Paradise.

1930, TAMA

We were all there, mother, sister, grandma, grandpa,

Aunt Ruth, Aunt Lillian, Uncle John, daddy, the baby,

Visiting Great Grandma Chitty, a small white house,

Indian corn hung at the back door, Indians

Coming to trade weaving for sugar, squaws

Of the Fox tribe, decaying on a reservation.

Great Grandpa Ben, the postmaster of Tama,

Collected birds' eggs, arranged in a glass case,

Dusty now, all his attention turned

To a sick canary, silent with the pip.

Little hump-backed, sun-baked Great Grandma

Set the Sunday table, roast beef with gravy,

My favorite on broken bread, and then we ate

And then we all piled into the Model T and waved

Goodbye, the American flag waving from

The stiff staff jutting out from the front porch.

1948, DES MOINES

After the last scene with my father, I quit

His country house and, flailing through cornfields,

That August, to Merle Hay Road, hitched

A truckride six blocks from grandmother's house

At 2929 56th Street between Hickman Avenue and Urbandale.

Up the shale-strewn drive, my footfalls waked

A neighbor who sang out "Who's there?", and I

Said, "I have walked all night to sleep

In my dead grandmother's house," and forced

The hook-and-eye latch on the screened-porch

Backdoor, sprawled on the WELCOME mat, and blind

Drunk, dreamt back my grandmother room by room.

UNCLE JOHN'S BEDROOM

Small, dark, square, the ceiling slanted, room

For a bed, a chest of drawers, a locked closet,

On the bed a brown-velvet patchwork stitched by grandma,

On the chest grandma's red and green cloisonné

Penny-jar full of Indian-heads -- 1896

To 1913 -- I used to steal the extras of.

I used to steal, into Uncle John's room,

To be Uncle John, an accountant, 30 years at home,

So stuffed he would crap out on his bed

After Sunday dinner, tired from rolling

Bowling balls late into the week-end nights:

Kingpin, a spare, clattering in the alley.

THE DINING ROOM

A tableau at the table (seen through the eyes

Of a satyr, prurient behind a pillar, in the blue

And gold Maxfield Parrish reproduction hung

Over the sideboard): Uncle John, Aunt Ruthie, mother,

Grandpa, my sister (Joanna) posed —a photograph—convened

For Sunday dinner (chicken, dumplings, cranberry

Sauce) served on a white damask tablecloth,

White damask napkins criss-crossed on their plates,

Looking toward a boy, five years old or more,

Who spills his milk (Is he really so distressed, abandoned

By his father?) Tantrum and tears. Grandma,

Cook and comforter, so real, outside the photoframe,

In the kitchen, she cannot rush in through

The swinging door to reach the heart of the poem.

THE KITCHEN

Although Grandpa McMullen, "Mac," the chief typographer

For the Des Moines Register and Tribune, was the

Breadwinner, Winifred, his wife, my grandmother,

Baked the bread -- her kitchen her life's work:

Clear Lake trout wrapped in the Register and Tribune;

Fresh crushed strawberry ice cream paddled

In a hand-turned ice-and-salt ice cream freezer;

Rump roast beef red in the core; mashed potato craters,

Runnells of beef gravy; currant jelly dripping -- drop,

Drop -- from a jelly bag. Was it Grandma, her plump breasts

Bound tight in gingham, dispensing round

Metaphors, food, like a first mother trimming the vines?

Innocent we ate, and we all helped her, later,

Wash up the pots and pans, the next day's bread

Rising in a tea-towel-covered crock, her body and her blood.

No wonder I cannot find her in that house.

THE LIVING ROOM

Grandpa's black typographer's jacket was slung

Over the arm of the shit-brown mohair sofa

And I robbed it of twenty cents, a crime, the guilt

Of which I reach for: a nickel slipped out of

My palm and dropped down the cold air

Register, clunk -- the rest, a nickel and a dime

Spent for banana candy at the A-1 Candy Store.

Grandma wanted whipping cream, knew

Grandpa had twenty cents in his black typographer's

Jacket, the only money in the house, except for

Uncle John's Indian heads. Mother,

After afternoon bridge, came to pick me up,

Heard the tale, and whipped me, grandma

In the kitchen, stiff with indignation.

When Grandma died, I made a scene, at the edge

Of her coffin, kicking and screaming, and meant,

Thereafter, and mean today, to find out her grave

And lay, among the weeds, before the headstone,

Twenty cents -- two nickels and a dime -- or banana candy,

Or a pint of whipping cream, mound upon mound.

THE BACKYARD, GARAGE AND GARDEN: A MOVIE

Black-and-white zoom-shot up to the pear tree blooming--

Montage with Grandma's bridal veil; 2) cut

To the fish pond; 3) color closeup of Oriental

Poppies and delphinium; 4) fade to the garage

Doors open and dolly in, past the Model T;

5) machine-gun the stuffed owl in the rafters: and

Flashback: full-length Grandma beside the pump,

Underneath the lilacs, pregnant with my mother.

THE END

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