by Adam Sol
Jeremiah,
OHIO
Jeremiah,
OHIO
a novel in poems
Adam Sol
Copyright © 2008 Adam Sol
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12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Sol, Adam, 1969–
Jeremiah, Ohio / Adam Sol.
Poems.
ISBN 978-0-88784-791-2
1. Jeremiah (Biblical prophet) — Poetry. I. Title.
PS8587.O41815J47 2008 C811’.6 C2008-901231-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008922791
Cover design: Bill Douglas
Typesetting: Laura Brady
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council
for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Printed and bound in Canada
CONTENTS
Invocation
Essen
Chillicothe Was the First Capital of the Ohio Territory
At the Flea Market
16% of Peebles Residents Report German Ancestry
Song of Sixty Days
Communion at Bruce’s Apartment
Confession During the Failing Buzz of the Post-Game Wrap-Up
Three Months Earlier
Jeremiah at the Outlet Mall
Athens Has Been Called One of the Top Ten Most Haunted Places in America
Lament for the Girls of Mt. Gilead
Modus Operandi
Stephen Hibbs at the Snell Street Luncheonette
Tutorial at the Corner of Wolfpen and 143
Driving Past a Broken Down Pickup Full of Migrants Late for Work in Willard
Due to Lighted Arches on High Street, Columbus Was, for a Time, Known as the Most Brilliantly Lit City in the Country
Doom Again on U.S. 36
Ohio Portrait in 5-Syllable Road Signs
Right Lane Must Exit
Elegy for the Truck
Ashland Radio
Aftermath
Waking and Hearing the Call of the City
Slopping in the Rain Between Wadsworth and Poe
Akron’s History Is Colorful, Painful, Diverse, and Inspiring
Bullfrog Jeremiah
Jeremiah’s Wounds
Jeremiah at the All Saints Cathedral, Youngstown
Jeremiah Plays Chess
What I’ve Got So Far, Approaching Youngstown and September
Hitching a Ride Out of California, PA
Swedish Immigrant Carl Eric Wickman Began Transporting Miners from Hibbing to Alice, MN, in 1914
Ponderosa Confession
Villanelle for Jeremiah’s Son
Jeremiah, PA
Pay When Boarding
Psalm of Scranton
Jeremiah Defaces a Roadside Shrine
Jeremiah at Beis T’fillah of Teaneck
Jeremiah’s Blues on the GW Bridge
Manhattanville Expansion Raises Questions About Aesthetics
Church of the Intercession
Hananiah
Redemption of the Field at Broadway and 88th
Gentrification of Upper Manhattan Is Not Yet Complete
At the Converted Bank
Our People. Our Work. Our Values.
Sprinting Through the 60s
Quickly Find Our Upcoming Events
Acrostic Lament
Come Spend a Great Day Downtown
Declaiming from the Wreckage
Post No Bills
Sgt. Ebediah (“Eddie”) King
Incidental Music Is Often Background Music
Fingerprinting
Song of Repentance
Support the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
In the Holding Pen
Religious Song
Items in the Prisoner’s Possession
Emotionally Disturbed Persons May Be Released into the Custody of Family Members at the Discretion of the Commanding Officer
We’re On Our Way
Newark Local
Forty-Two Percent of Greyhound Passengers Are Between the Ages of 18 and 34
How I wanted to see a vision then
Last Words
Song of Leaving
Acknowledgments
INVOCATION
These are the words of Jeremiah, the son of Hank,
of the failed farmers and short-order cooks
who tilled and tore the soil of Southern Ohio
in the days that became years that became confusion.
These are his words, poor bastard,
who roared himself ragged
during the reign of Soandso and his Valiant Pals.
Hear the summons, o wanderers and worriers!
See me pulling the planks from your porch!
Woe unto ye, corporate communicators!
Behold the oily ends of your extended lunches!
Yea, I have been sent to root out and pull down,
to lubricate and decimate,
to build and to plant.
Who will accompany me on my trail of frustration?
Who will lend me a button?
I have seen and will give voice to my grief.
I will be delivered C.O.D.
May the words of my mouth
and the declamations of my fury
tear holes in the outerwear of the people.
Let them feel the hot gust.
ESSEN
Begin with the wind disguising itself as a rake. An exit sign points out toward the saddest patch of grass in Western Ohio. A man has heard grave announcements from passing radios and resigned himself to a night of wet gravel. He can smell an ambient summer storm gathering its skirts like an expectant mother, and has reasons to expect the worst: his lost sweater, or the thigh bruises given him by an overzealous camera salesman.
There have been hours of walking and hours of standing still. And his cardboard plea for Columbus may as well read Belgium.
A blue Buick Skylark pulls onto the median from the opposing lane, as if to let the man know he hasn’t gone unseen in the shrill heat. Hitching his greasepants the man considers an idea of communion, and hopsteps across the empty asphalt toward her chariot. But by the time he has crossed the divide the woman at the wheel has lobbed a paper bag through her window into the hissing milkweed and torn off, shredding roadside wildgrass with her magnificent radials.
When he looks back west with the package in hi
s fist to offer a gesture of thanks or greeting, she has diminished into a mere blur on the slope, rising then winking out like a last glimpse of the old life he once lived in a town with flax fields and homemade honey.
Inside the bag: a napkin to wipe his bleeding ear. A plastic spoon to dig for snails. An apple. And printed words wrapped jauntily around a tub of yoghurt: “70% LESS FAT” glorious on the still-cool container in his grip.
The man sits to work his mouth around the rush of unlikely letters embracing his hammered hand, and contemplates the need for some significant gesture. Another semi wrongs its horn blasting past in a flurry of dust and shattered grasshoppers. The man hoists his tub in furious salute: “I receive your Pectin! I receive your Xanthan Gum!” chewing the syllables, nourished enough to knot his knees toward Richwood.
CHILLICOTHE WAS THE FIRST CAPITAL OF THE OHIO TERRITORY
It’s two, and once I’ve dropped off
my load of loaves and Twinkies
at the State Pen In-And-Out,
I can spend the afternoon
smoking at the Indian
Mount State Park. Dispatch doesn’t
need the van till five thirty,
and each cigarette burns off
a little of the day’s shame.
No one’s looking for me here.
But halfway through my first fire
I hear a man at the gate
standing with his arms outspread
like he is trying to call
down the rain. He is making
roaring noises in his throat
and when the ranger asks him
to move along, he starts
yelling, “What unrighteousness
have your fathers found in me
that now they are gone from me?!”
Something like that. The ranger
is just a kid, probably
working off student loans, so
I say, “Listen, buddy, d’you
need a ride or what?” Right away
he grabs his army duffel
and slings it into my truck.
He sits on the floor in back
next to a crate of Sno-Balls.
Then he asks, “What is thy name?”
I can hardly keep myself
from laughing, but I answer,
“Bruce Gray, scholar and bread man.”
Jeremiah shakes my hand,
and looks straight into my face.
His hands are already scarred
and yellow with calluses.
“Are you upright and holy?”
“Sure.” “Can you transcribe the words
I speak?” “I can type, if that’s
what you mean.” “Good. I thank you
for your kindness. It will not
go unnoticed, if you catch
my drift.” “I catch it.” “Drive on.”
AT THE FLEA MARKET
All along the riverside my towns are breaking down.
My Delhis and Mount Orabs,
my New Harmonys and Crowns.
I lost my heart at Dairy Mart for lack of home-baked bread,
and blundered into wonder
and was crushed like a possum on Route 32.
Will you hear, O my people? Will you heed my bells and whistles?
Will you teen girls worrying your split ends
remark on my resonance and tears?
Where can I go to find solace,
if even the restrooms are for customers only? Yea,
the women of Williamsburg
are selling suitcases at the Sunday jubilee,
along with ceramic geese and rifles.
What can they learn from me, except that their villages
are vanishing?
Behold, they are sitting on a bowl that has
been dropped from the table. Like a potter’s toy
we must be refired.
They know this well. Their town is an astonishment and a hissing.
They should know better than to recline on lawn chairs
and bake their bellies like berries.
O fair-haired mothers! O mole-chinned grannies!
Remove your orange sunglasses —
reveal the squinting of your hearts!
Be not worse than your uncles who sowed wheat
and reaped thorns in this asphalt pasture!
Save your old yards with their hopeful black-eyed susans
and their weary black-eyed Susans.
16% OF PEEBLES RESIDENTS REPORT GERMAN ANCESTRY
Way back before his heart broke
I suppose Jeremiah
was just as crazy as all
his neighbors. But that was long
before I met him. By then
he’d been seen cursing dumpsters
in Lynchburg, scolding billboards
and McDonald’s customers
even as far as Peebles.
As for me, I’d been feeling
embarrassed, knowing full well
that even my loneliness
was common, that my profound
despair was a tired cliché.
I’d dropped out of grad school and
disappointed my mentors,
because I can’t see myself
fitting into the role of
Expert in Po Mo Flim Flam.
If only I could yadda
yadda instead of blahblahblah.
And then, to top it all off,
I fucked up the closest thing
I’d had to a family
since I left my sad mother
to her lists and memories.
I was in purgatory,
delivering faux-baked goods
to gas station groceries,
mini-marts, and convenience
stores in Southern Ohio
from Athens to Columbus.
Of course I thought he was nuts,
in a harmless hobo way,
and when I gave him a box
of Ho Hos, he nearly cried
from gratitude. It had been
a long while since I had done
something good for anyone.
So I invited him home
for a shower, an old pair
of pants, dinner, and a couch.
Why he made the decision
to promote me from chauffeur
to secretary and aide
is a mystery to me.
Maybe because I said Yes.
The “Baked” painted on the side
of my cab had been scraped off
by some bored schoolboys in Clark,
so the side of the truck just
said, “Goods.” That, too, may have been
enough, desperate as he was
for signs that the world had not
completely abandoned him.
SONG OF SIXTY DAYS
It is true I went to see the Mayor
in his office of plaques.
And true he showed me photos of himself
with notables local and spectacular.
True too that though I held his elbow and begged him
to abandon the chase and submit to his fate,
to kowtow to the clowns for the sake of the town,
he held his haughty head high
and frowned.
The man is in the full sway of hand-sets,
biceps and fudge,
and though he nodded,
his very chin was not his own.
Sixty days I have wandered these hills,
and I have seen little to lighten my heart.
Tables are still set without trembling,
and salesmen thumb scales from Damascus to Defiance.
When will my people learn
that their china is made of their own bones?
Who will tell them that their city was doomed
from the start to test products and poisons?
Why have they cast aside my teachings,
and erected
rapacious billboards
like so many weeds in the fields?
Yea, they are a city of cash cows.
They will be slaughtered for cut-rate soup stock,
and their labels will shout judgment
from the shelves of mini-marts
from Waco to Tungsten.
COMMUNION AT BRUCE’S APARTMENT
Two men on a cracked couch, shiny with pizza grease and the inarticulate reflection of the Reds in a close one against the Cardinals. The silent understanding of passing over another bottle of Bud. And the resonant syllogisms over the health of Griffey’s shoulder. It’s going to be a long summer. J exhausted from baring his head and chest to the winds and passersby of Chillicothe. B too glib to understand himself — his words make sense, but they aren’t true. Boone hits a lonely two-out double off the right field wall. It amounts to nothing — Dunn whiffs in three pitches. There is a small spiritual truth in their shared sadness and frustration. Is this enough? Tonight it is enough.
CONFESSION DURING THE FAILING BUZZ OF THE POST-GAME WRAP-UP
I lied earlier. I’m not upright or holy.
I turned the volume down, and we watched Joe Morgan equivocating with his eyebrows.
All are holy in the eyes of —
Well, not upright, then.
How have you slouched?
There was a touch of glee in his voice, as if he’d been waiting all night for me to speak. Or as if I had something stuck to my nose.
I feel as if I’m in the process of failing as a person.
The smirk disappeared then, and he turned to me. His eyebrows turned up, and he was listening with a strange, blunt attention. Who had I ever talked to like this?
First off, I sort of got between my best friends’ marriage.
The commercials were loud, even with the sound off. Each frame cut flashed and glittered until the tv strobed. J leaned back and rubbed his grizzled chin.
I see. And you seek redemption.
I guess.
From your God.
I don’t know about that.
He stood up and unbuttoned his shirt, draping it over the screen. Underneath was a faded black T-shirt that said Caleb’s Grill.