At the Putney Co-Op, an Opera

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
—Allen Ginsberg

"Go ahead," I say to my neighbor at the Putney Co-op who tells

me he can't complain. "Let it out. It's mid-March and there's still

two feet of snow on the ground. Fukushima has just melted down and

the Washington Monument cracked at its pyramidion. Put down your

bags and sing. How many times dear father, graybeard, lonely old

courage teacher must you walk down the aisles as a randy eidolon

humming your tunes for us to start? Our song begins in silence and grows

to a buzz. We make it up as we go along, then watch our numbers swell—

ten thousand members who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Who fly

like a swarm to join us in our chambers, which are these aisles."

I'm singing without knowing it, carrying the tune of main things,

lamenting the prices with Bernie Sanders. My neighbor joins me

for no other reason than singing along as a member of the cast we call

the multitudes of lonely shoppers. I roam the aisles with the sadness

of America, juggling onions, blessing the beets. It's a local stage on

which the country opens like a flower that no one sees beside the road.

In my hungry fatigue, I'm shopping for images, which are free on the highest

shelf but costly in their absence—the only ingredient here that heals my sight

of blindness. I see you, Walt Whitman, pointing your beard toward axis

mundi by the avocados, reading the labels as if they were lines, weighing

the tomatoes on the scale of your palms, pressing the pears with your thumbs

the way you did in Huntington, Camden, and Brooklyn. And you, also, Ruth

and Hayden, at the checkout counter with empty bags you claim are full

of apples, almonds, and bananas. What can you say to those outside who

haven't read your poems? Who find it hard to get the news from poetry

but die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

It's night. The Connecticut slips by across Rt. 5. The moon is my egg

and stars, my salt. I score the music of the carrots, scallions, and corn in

the frost of the freezer windows. The sough of traffic on 91 washes my ears

with the sound of tires on blue macadam. The doors close in an hour....

We'll both be lonely when we return on the long dark roads to our silent

houses. I touch your book and dream of our odyssey westward to a field

in Oregon, Kansas, or California where we plant our oars and die ironically.

Where we finish our journey as strangers in our native land. These are the

lyrics to our song in the aisles—the buzz of the swarm with our queen

at the center. What America did you have, old howler, when you scattered

into the sky, then floated like a cloud as another form in the making outside

of time, forgetful at last and empty of all you sang?

Source: Interstate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)