Remembering Minneapolis
Bill Waltz's poem "Future Structures" was the featured poem on Poetry Daily yesterday. It reminded me of our visit to Minneapolis a few years ago and sitting upstairs in Bill & Brett's two family, listening to a Caruso album.
So I e-mailed Bill yesterday to say hi, and to send him this poem that I had written a year or so ago. Both L. and I were enamored with Bill & Brett's daughter Clark Mercy, who seemed so free-spirited and full of joie de vivre. Like me, Bill is also from Ohio. The poem was sparked by his telling me that he was going to take a road trip to his hometown in Ohio with Clark Mercy.
BILL AND CLARK DRIVE TO OHIO
An inked sky, an arm out the window
a father and a daughter with the middle name “Mercy”
a two lane highway through corn-tassled fields
and a faint suggestion of hills:
This is what it means to drive to Ohio,
something we must all do.
Clark is of the age of chasing rabbits
in the sculpture garden, the age
of standing on her head on the welcome mat
of a tile-floored coffeehouse.
Somewhere in the state, coal arrives on a barge,
a man lies in a hammock, drinking beer from a can
and boys leap from a railroad tressle into a river,
and they sound like bullets.
The man in the song sings, “The Cuyahoga River
goes smoking through my dreams.”
The thick-rimmed glasses, the tire noise-
by Ohio, I mean Wapokaneta.
Somewhere, slowing down to drive through
a town with one crossroad,
or trying to read from a map when
confronted by a cluster of road signs,
Clark will say, Dad, this is where
James Wright’s ghost lives-
which is true of much of Ohio.
So I e-mailed Bill yesterday to say hi, and to send him this poem that I had written a year or so ago. Both L. and I were enamored with Bill & Brett's daughter Clark Mercy, who seemed so free-spirited and full of joie de vivre. Like me, Bill is also from Ohio. The poem was sparked by his telling me that he was going to take a road trip to his hometown in Ohio with Clark Mercy.
BILL AND CLARK DRIVE TO OHIO
An inked sky, an arm out the window
a father and a daughter with the middle name “Mercy”
a two lane highway through corn-tassled fields
and a faint suggestion of hills:
This is what it means to drive to Ohio,
something we must all do.
Clark is of the age of chasing rabbits
in the sculpture garden, the age
of standing on her head on the welcome mat
of a tile-floored coffeehouse.
Somewhere in the state, coal arrives on a barge,
a man lies in a hammock, drinking beer from a can
and boys leap from a railroad tressle into a river,
and they sound like bullets.
The man in the song sings, “The Cuyahoga River
goes smoking through my dreams.”
The thick-rimmed glasses, the tire noise-
by Ohio, I mean Wapokaneta.
Somewhere, slowing down to drive through
a town with one crossroad,
or trying to read from a map when
confronted by a cluster of road signs,
Clark will say, Dad, this is where
James Wright’s ghost lives-
which is true of much of Ohio.