This week I recited a new poem at a unique spoken word event. Chicago art gallery Vibrant Cast invited me to write a poem inspired by a specific work of art. I was randomly assigned Kyle Barron’s brilliant photograph, The Last Stop. I did not meet Kyle until the evening of the event so the poem was based entirely on my own imagination and assumptions, albeit inspired by Kyle’s extremely vivid and skillful composition.
You can see and purchase more of Kyle’s work and that of other talented local artists (including my wife, painter and poet Debra Rodriguez) at Vibrant Cast’s website: https://vibrantcast.com/
I was extremely fortunate to have such an evocative image as my inspiration. The event was, without hyperbole, one of the best evenings of my life. My poem was well received, which is always gratifying but I also had the distinct pleasure of meeting Kyle. Though we work in different media we have a lot in common
The day also happened to be my daughter’s birthday. She and Debra are subtly featured in a few lines of the poem, much of which is sort of a fictionalized autobiography.
It was also a bittersweet event as many of us remained worried and grieving about the disaster in Los Angeles. The next day was a real tangle of emotions as I enjoyed the afterglow of my success while absorbing the horror of the fires. If you are able to donate or volunteer in support of the people left homeless please don’t hesitate. Social media is emphasizing the celebrities who have lost their homes but we need to remember that most of the victims are ordinary Americans who simply need to survive and care for their families.
Here’s the poem I read that evening:
Time is a Tendency Toward Nonbeing
You can see the municipal impound lot from the moving train
Most are short-term visitors
With inscrutable greasy crayon numbers
written on their windows
Some are wrecks that won’t ever leave under their own power
Is a car still an automobile if it doesn’t move?
We make things and nature reclaims them
Rust rot and gravity conspire
to reduce compounds and constructions
Back to base molecules and elements
Time is the undoing of all things
Less a real thing than the yardstick or the sundial
Or the supposedly sempiternal soul
But for objects, even the objects of pride and desire
No amount of care and cleverness
Can make a thing eternal or everlasting
It’s not a child or a kitten or a sunflower seedling
Growing in invisible increments
A team in canvas gloves, overalls, and goggles
Takes a pile of constituent parts,
Metal, plastic, leather, rubber
And in just hours, or a day or two they make a little van
The little bus is parked as if posing
In a building that could be an insurance agency
Or a retail store
The floors waxed to a high sheen
The salesmen at their metal desks
Unsoiled tires, chromium hubcaps
Glossy enamel flirting with the light
No dirt, no scratches nor dents
Headlights bright and unclouded
Bumpers reflecting the incandescent bulbs overhead
Flat-faced, forward control with a four-cylinder engine
And a two-digit number on the odometer
Anxiously, impatiently a young couple negotiates
Finally signing papers and taking the key and a spare
The sticker price of the 1967 Volkswagen Transporter Bus is $2,667
A vertiginous, dizzying number
Ten percent of the value of their house,
Nearly half a year’s salary
He doesn’t love the color
Orange with a vanilla ice-cream top
A little unmanly
Dismiss your appetite for hippy stuff, rock-and-roll, or psychedelics
it is a family car
They love it but not in the way you love a person
For a while it is the preferred conveyance
For family vacations, Big Sur, The Grand Canyon, Yellowstone
When issues of reliability and parental prudence collide
It’s swapped for an American-made sedan
*****
A lean shivering man shoves gloveless hands into a coat pocket
January is a hell of a time to buy a car
He’s impulsive, twenty-two
The salesman in a green plaid overcoat
Smiles broadly and strokes a voluminous icicled mustache
For two days they drive in shifts
From a cold Midwestern city to the golden west
They spend their last few dollars on antifreeze and oil
They have no particular reason to move to California
Other than it is other-than
He finds an office job, accounts payable
She paints and works in a shop
They live in the basement in-law apartment
of a craftsman bungalow
Cold and damp with a concrete floor
For a while they share it with a rat
But the landlord is good enough to hire an exterminator
A seven-pound girl is born
On an unusually cold Bay Area morning
He scrapes frost from the microbus’ windshield at three AM
She rushes into the world taking the parents and the doctor,
In her muumuu and Birkenstocks, by surprise
They find a better apartment in the Oakland hills
With a garage for the microbus
Baby scoots on the hardwood floors
She begins to use the coffee table to support her fat little legs
One day she lets go of the table and wobbles toward her father
Her first word is kitty – it sounds like “gee-gee”
They buy their own little bungalow in the Berkeley flats
(It will reach a value of over a million dollars
in the early 21st century)
Office mates are leasing Beamers and Benzes
But he can’t give up the van
it grows rustier and burns more oil
****
Blood-red paint peels then disappears altogether
From the bungalow’s front porch
A latch rusts away so the gate swings wildly on its hinges
Allowing the yellow mongrel to escape again
He shuffles unaided through the neighborhood calling her name
He never fixes the gate
The odometer hits a six-figure number
A couple of guys from the Home Depot parking lot
Help him roll the microbus into the backyard
(to avoid parking tickets and the impound lot)
It never rolls again
The tires pancake
Field mice make a home under the hood and in the upholstery
Oxygen and water make a meal of the steel
(The rust may seem random but in fact there’s a pattern)
The driver’s side door wants to swing open
So it’s secured with a bungee cord
threaded through a broken window
Stingray, a lesser-known album by Joe Cocker
Is jammed, now unplayable
In an aftermarket 8-track tape player
Though the tires are rife with organic material
It’s an object. It has no soul
Though a product of intelligence, it has none of its own
(built before onboard computers were commonplace)
But it is suffused with the cells and DNA of its occupants
And it is a catalyst for human memories,
Those imperfect distended pictures
For decades it rests and rolls on concrete and tarmac
Tires taut with pressure
Sidewalls once waxy and gleaming
Now pebbled and pitted with rust
Soil and grass beneath wheels that are not wheels
Nature takes the elements back
Iron that was once inside the earth
Rubber that was once inside a tree
It will probably be hooked to a tow truck
Hauled away to be dismantled or crushed
But it could remain here without utility
If we are patient and can wait
For time, nature, and inevitability
To absorb and erase this thing.
Ideas, Like Sugar and Caffeine 