The Delta Parade
Everything stops.
A fat man on his way to Baltimore
smokes for three hours in the club car.
The porter slips out and calls his wife,
he has one dime left and he’s almost
yelling. Somewhere south of York,
she thinks he said. The funeral
procession leaves its lights on
and out of this pure stubbornness
its batteries go dead.
The bank robber leans on his horn
in desperation while his partner
snaps the rubber bands around
the money. A band,
you can hear it up the river,
first like the new heart of the child on
your lap, then like an old moon
pulsing below your nails, or something
softly moving through your arms and
throat. Here,
press here, not just drums.
A clown is throwing caramels
at the porch rails, balloons
are exploding or sailing up the river.
The lucky trees, to be able
to stand that close. If we talk
too much, we’ll surely miss it.
And at the still center
of summer it starts; cowboys ride out out
of another life, old cars get up
from the dead and dance
like cripples hired out for a tent meeting.
Up and down the sidewalk, the town
sucks in its breath like a girl
taking short gasps just above her trumpet,
or a fire engine’s horn, heaving
like a drowned man or a heat wave slapping
against the water tower, this afternoon
just like a parade. The sore-footed
ponies are loaded down with flags
and the library float says
“Immortal Shakespeare,” says it
with carnations and the hides of roses,
says it with a jester and a princess
wearing wings.
And she stutters, but no one cares
or can hear her. Except for the man
on the unicycle who tips his top hat
to the crowd, who swears he will
follow her anywhere, who follows
the mayor and the city council, who
follows the tap dancing class and the Future
Farmers, the Lions Club and the Veterans
of Foreign Wars; who clasps a carnation
between his teeth and sways
back and forth like
a broken clock.
And then things begin again,
a car follows the man on the unicycle
and suddenly it’s just another car,
a pair of dice dangling
from the rearview mirror, a woman
giving her breast to a child and another
child carefully peeling a crayon, then
slowly giving the peels to his
grandmother, who opens the big brass
clasps of her pocketbook and lets
the bright curls drop slowly
to the bottom
like confetti or a boy’s first
haircut. Like a first yellow leaf
that fell when we weren’t looking.
Because it’s summer. Like a smooth
yellow pebble that is rubbing and rubbing
in the new left boot of the drummer,
that someone skimmed on the river
exactly at three o’clock.
Not out of anger or of boredom
this time, but as if it could almost
wear wings.
Copyright Credit: Susan Stewart, “The Delta Parade” from Yellow Stars and Ice. Copyright © 1981 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Princeton University Press.
Source: Yellow Stars and Ice (Princeton University Press, 1981)