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.