Ode to an All-American Boyhood

To Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, James Dickey

Were you guys lucky, too, to caddy, the light

on freshly-sprinkled fairway delicate and bright as eye of an

Indiana owl

or glitter of fish flickering in the Shedd Aquarium of the

imagination,

the tough but tender touch of leather socks covering the cobra-

headed clubs, the crack

of brassie on golf ball like whip of mule skinner filling all Death

Valley;

or to anoint oneself in grease and oil, sweating

beneath the belly of a car or truck in the pit in Shimskis' Garage

in Homewood;

or to find felicity at Marshall Field's as a stockboy numb and

dazed by rawboned, adolescent lust, stumbling about

beneath a pyramid of boxes past models cooly on parade

among the customers all day, filling immaculate brassieres

with flesh like fortune cookies and in silken Oriental half-slips

as I sweat like Sydney Greenstreet examining the statue of the

Maltese Falcon in his hotel suite;

and to fight, like a goddamn fool, in Navy alleys behind

black-and-tan saloon in Minneapolis, my iron ring, its

longhorns, slashing, can open up a cheek;

and to sweat out a basketball game of one-on-one, the comments

cryptic and intense as a fragment by Archilochos;

and to pitch papers onto porches on a bike route as if your arm

were Bobby Feller's blazing corncobs at a knot-hole in Des

Moines;

to cut the uncut hair of graves beneath an R. Crumb "Keep on

Truckin'" sun large as a lemon drop, and to hawk cufflinks

made by Swank as well as cashmere sweaters from the

Shetland Isles, to scrub as if they had the London Plague of

Robert Greene dying in a bed of straw in Cheapside Gran

Canyons filled with dirty dishes in the Phi Gam kitchen in

Bloomington, to tool around behind wheel of Checker taxi as

if it were a chariot in a race in Babylon, to tote the 85¢ YWCA

Blueplate Special to the widows of the ghosts of pioneers, to

mix drink behind the bar as if concocting cocktails for Long

John Silver and Blind Pew or Bathhouse John and wee,

shrewd Hinky Dink, to create a 100 half-moons in a night by

manipulating the control box in this elevator roomy as a

shoebox purchased by Paul Powell here in a hotel with its 50

bags full of the fleas of Illinois—

this great, unique chance to hear the language where it lives.

Source: New and Selected Poems (The Yellow Press, 1978)