The Blue Buick

by B. H. Fairchild

of hands, smile’s exploding nova, eyes two moons

  across that smoke-burdened, blue neon room—

  a kind of storm, or far, Cartesian weather.

  Shapeless forms balloon inside a lava lamp

  above the Wurlitzer’s warped, ancient Coltrane,

  “Body and Soul”—“the music of becoming,”

  Campbell says, “Plato’s spiral of ascent

  toward the Forms, the unattainable,

  the way those chords unravel, then take flight . . .”

  His voice wobbles, trails off, vanishes

  beneath the gathering cloud of his cigar,

  then floats back up, “Gödel, you see, had proved

  no system is complete or closed, no life

  contains its own clear validation.” Arms

  waving, he heads back into the kitchen

  where he washes dishes now and lives

  behind the Texaco across the street, among

  his books, and thinks about the end of thought.

  FROM

  The Beauty of

  Abandoned Towns

  In memory of O.T. and Nellie Swearingen

  . . . labor omnia vicit

  improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas.

  —VIRGIL, GEORGICS

  1. The Beauty of Abandoned Towns

  Finally we sold out—you know, the big farm eats the small farm.

  —EDNA PFORR, NORTH DAKOTA

  . . . ruins do not speak; we speak for them.

  —CHRISTOPHER WOODWARD, IN RUINS

  Jefferson, Marx, and Jesus. Looking back, you can hardly believe it.

  Bindweed and crabgrass shouldering through asphalt cracks, rats scuttling down drainpipes, undergrowth seething with grasshoppers.

  The bumper crop in 1929. I stood on the front porch, dawn rolling over me like a river baptism because I was a new man in a new world, a stand of gold and green stretching from my hands to the sun coming up. In a way, a mirage. We bought a house in town. There it is. Or was.

  The water tower, taller than the copper domes of Sacred Heart in Leoville, silhouette flooding the football field, missing boards of the scavenged bleachers, minor prophecies: Bobby + Pam forever, Panthers rule, PEACE NOW.

  Presence is absence, says the philosopher. The future devours the past. Look at the goatgrass and ragweed claiming the feed store.

  Sunflowers banging their heads on a conclusion of brick, the wind’s last argument lost in a yellow cloud.

  Eugene Debs set up The People’s College in Fort Scott. Meridel Le Sueur grew up there. It lasted three years. Imagine: Comrade Debs, Comrade Sheppard, Comrade Le Sueur. In Kansas.

  The open windows of the high school no longer surprise, pigeons flying in and out, the dumb cry of blackboards, wooden desks hauled away with the carved names of the long absent, the lost, the dead, the escaped.

  The Farmer’s Alliance tried. Socialist farm policy was for them a straight road to Jefferson’s democracy. But they were always blocked by the big landowners. The deal breaker was profits, not politics. The harvest was topsoil, not wheat.

  The last hitching post. The last horse, I suppose. Like Sunday morning, the last hymn, the last person to hear the last hymn. May the circle be unbroken. The circle is broken.

  We subscribed to the Haldeman-Julius Appeal to Reason, published out of little Girard, Kansas. Our children grew up on his Little Blue Books. The Federalist Papers, Thoreau, Emerson, Marx, Ingersoll, Upton Sinclair.

  The clapboard stores, slats long ago sand-blasted in dust storms, bleached or ochre now, gray, the faint green and yellow of a Lipton Tea ad on red brick. Broken windows flashing the setting sun in a little apocalypse of light, blind men in shades staring at the horizon, waiting for a sign. Stillness everywhere.

  You know, you’re wasting your time. No one gives a shit about this. None of it. No one.

  Dearth of cars, motion, grind of gears, noise of commerce, chatter and cry of farm kids dangling from the beds of rusted-out pickups, murmur and guffaw of old men outside the Savings and Loan, stories, jokes. Quiet as a first snow. Somewhere a dog barks. A wire gate slams shut.

  I’m so goddamned old I still tense up when an afternoon sky darkens. A roller would come in, dust up to eight thousand feet. If you were in the field, you were lost until it cleared. Or dead from suffocation. Where was your family? Where were your children?

  Houses with tin roofs, wrap-around porches for watching thunderstorms, most vacant but here and there pickup windows flaming in sunset, trimmed lawn, history in forty years of license plates nailed to the garage wall. Cellar door. Swing set, that little violin screech of rusted chains, hush of evening, choir of cicadas. The living among the dead.

  It started when agriculture professors began to teach farming as a business rather than a vocation. And then the big ones over the years ate the little ones. But in this country vocations are exploited. Ask the public school teachers.

  The lords of grain: two cats fat on field mice lounge beneath the elevator steps where dust from a caliche road powders them white—wraiths, or white surrender flags.

  On the other hand, subsidies can kill small farms these days. Back then we were desperate. Our children were hungry. FDR kept us alive. Then something went wrong. Big got bigger, small died. Still dying, hanging on but bedridden. The Ogallala Aquifer’s almost tapped out. I mean, for God’s sake.

  Between the boarded bank and the welding shop husks drift like molted feathers or the sloughed scales of cottonmouths. Weeds waist-high shade the odd shoe still laced, a Coke carton bleeding into bluestem, dulled scraps of newsprint that say who died in Ashland or Sublette or Medicine Lodge.

  It goes back to the oikos, the Greek family farm. Some ethic, some code of honor, kept them small. Big was vulgar, immoral. The Romans, too. Cato the Elder, rich as Joe Kennedy, taught his son agronomy, not commerce.

  They are not haunted. They are not the “ghosts of themselves.” They are cousin to vanishing, to disappearance. They are the highway that runs through them.

  The picture show shut down decades ago. That’s where we saw the world, the world our children and grandchildren ran off to. What happens when a nation loses its agrarian populace? My grandson worked as an usher there. He’s a poet now. We have more poets than farmers. I don’t think that’s what Jefferson had in mind.

  Not even decline, but the dawn of absence. Architecture of the dead. The lives they housed are dust, the wind never stops.

  A disproportionate percentage of the American soldiers killed in Iraq were from small rural towns. The farmer/soldier, foundation of the Greek polis. Fodder for war. Blood harvest.

  The wind never stops. Our children were hungry. The highway’s long blade under the sun. Something went wrong. The towns are empty. The circle is broken.

  2. Bloom School

  In 1936 dust storms would clot

  the mortar of its bricks, but now the wind

  sweeps clean its crumbling, fluted columns

  and pollinates a field of bluestem

  and sunflowers tall as high school kids.

  Nothing is everywhere: doorless doorways,

  dirt-filled foundations, and weed-pocked

  sidewalks leading to a sky that blued

  the eyes of bored students stupefied

  by geometry and Caesar’s Latin.

  Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.

  Who cared how Gaul’s past was divvied up?

  Every radio in every car in Bloom

  cried Now, and now was an eternity

  except at graduation when the future

  was invented by the Baptist minister.

  The stars that evening fell on Main Street

  and sank into our laminated hoods

  streaked with downtown lights, and heaven

  once more rolled across our rolling lives.

  My wife and I made love here last night.

  I manage kitchenware at Walmart,

  and sometimes the future rides my back the w
ay

  I rode my rented combine years ago.

  So Ann and I will come here evenings when

  a fat moon floats in absent hallways, their lost,

  remembered voices rising through the stillness,

  and in other rooms students struggle over

  Euclid’s arcs and circles and bend to translate

  the vanished past into another tongue.

  3. The Teller

  The bank so buried under hungry shrubs,

  snakeweed, and creeper reaching even

  to the carved stone BANK ESTABLISHED 1910

  that its octagonal rust brick seems to shirk

  a street long gone.

  Where is he now,

  Mr. Spivey, the only teller, who lived

  above STATE FARM and had a wife in Blue Creek

  he never saw? What led him there?

  What kept her in a darkness we could

  only wonder at? Men lived with wives,

  we thought, the new moon rose, snow fell,

  and familiar as a thumb each Sunday

  Mr. Spivey sang the solo parts in choir,

  angelically, our mothers said.

  Fridays,

  staying late, he cashed our paychecks,

  small hands counting out and pushing

  stacks of new bills crisp as corn sheaves

  beneath the cage. Smiling through the bars,

  he called us mister, as I, oddly, call him now.

  Good evening, Mr. Elwood. Good day, Mr. Smith,

  the words thin and lyrical as the paper

  whispering in our ears.

  Coming from the PALACE

  those nights, we would sometimes see his shadow

  in the risen window on the square, the streets

  of Edward Hopper dimly lit below where

  people walked and laughed and talked

  about new money earned and saved or spent.

  All across America there must have been

  such streets and such men who touched

  the people’s hands with money and lived alone.

  4. Wheat

  For in the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread.

  In Clyde, Missouri, the Benedictine Sisters

  of Perpetual Adoration cut unleavened bread

  into communion wafers and gather them

  in plastic bags folded, stapled, and later packed

  in boxes. After compline the sisters rise again

  from prayers, lie down upon their narrow beds,

  and wait for sleep’s wide wings to fold around them.

  Their hands still give the light sweet smell of bread,

  and loaves like little clouds drift through their dreams,

  wafers raining down to make a blizzard

  of the Word made flesh, Corpus Christi,

  of God’s own Son. On evening break at Walmart

  Doris Miller spreads ketchup on her Big Mac

  and salts her fries, time and wages swallowed

  like a sacrament, eternity the dregs

  that throng and cluster in the shallows

  of her complimentary Styrofoam cup.

  At the Exxon next door, Walter Miller

  lifts his pickup’s hood, then turns to stare

  at the acreage he used to own across the road.

  Was his wheat, he wonders, even the smallest grain

  in its long ascent to final form, ever changed into

  the body of our Lord? The Benedictine Sisters

  of Perpetual Adoration wake to matins, prayers

  that rise like crane migrations over feedlots,

  packing houses, hog farms, the abandoned small

  stores of Leeton, the Dixon Community Center,

  the Good Samaritan Thrift Shop in Tarkio.

  A gravel road veers toward the Open Door Cafe,

  windows boarded up and painted powder blue

  and lemon Day-Glo, perpetual sunrise on

  a town silent as the absent cry of starlings

  or idle irrigation pumps rusting in the dust

  of August, where the plundered, corporate earth

  yields the bread placed in the outstretched palms,

  take and eat, of the citizens of Clyde, Missouri.

  Madonna and Child, Perryton, Texas, 1967

  A litter of pickups nose into Sancho’s Market

  south of town late Friday night rinsed in waves

  of pink neon and samba music from some station

  in Del Rio spilling out across the highway.

  Sancho’s wife dances alone behind the cash box

  while her daughter, Rosa, tries to quiet her baby

  whose squalls rip through the store like a weed cutter

  shredding the souls of the carnal, the appetitious,

  indeed the truly depraved as we in our grievous

  late-night stupor and post-marijuana hunger

  curse the cookie selection and all its brethren

  and Al yells at Leno lost among the chips,

  beef jerky, string cheese, bananas for Chrissakes,

  that if he doesn’t stop now and forever telling

  Okie jokes he will shoot his dog who can’t hunt

  anyway so what the hell, but the kid is unreal,

  a cry ascending to a shriek, then a kind

  of rasping roar, the harangue of the gods,

  sirens cleaving the air, gangs of crazed locusts

  or gigantic wasps that whine and ding our ears

  until the air begins to throb around us

  and a six-pack of longnecks rattles like snakes

  in my hand. And then poor Rosa is kissing

  its forehead, baby riding her knee like a little boat

  lost at sea, and old Sancho can’t take it either,

  hands over his ears, Dios mio, ya basta! Dios mio,

  so Rosa opens her blouse, though we don’t look,

  and then we do, the baby sucking away, plump cheeks

  pumping, billowing sails of the Santa Maria

  in a high wind, the great suck of the infinite

  making that little nick, nick sound, Rosa

  smiling down, then Sancho turns off the radio

  and we all just stand there in the light and shadow

  of a flickering fluorescent bulb, holding

  our sad little plastic baskets full of crap,

  speechless and dying a little inside as Rosa

  whispers no llores, no llores, mija, mijita,

  no llores, and the child falls asleep, lips

  on breast, drops of milk trickling down,

  we can even hear it breathing, hear ourselves

  breathing, the hush all around and that hammer

  in our chests so that forty years later

  this scene still hangs in my mind, a later work,

  unfinished, from the workshop of Zurbarán.

  What He Said

  When Candi Baumeister announced to us all

  that J.D. was in love with Brigitte Bardot,

  drawing those two syllables out like some kid

  stretching pink strands of Dubble Bubble

  from between her teeth, J.D. chose not

  to duck his head in the unjust shame

  of the truly innocent but rather lifted it

  in the way of his father scanning the sky

  in silent prayer for the grace of rain abundant

  upon his doomed soybeans or St. Francis

  blessing sparrows or the air itself, eyes radiant

  with Truth and Jesus, and said, Babydoll,

  I would walk on my tongue from here to Amarillo

  just to wash her dishes.

  There is a time

  in the long affliction of our spoken lives when,

  among all the verbal bungling, stupidity,

  and general disorder that burden us

  like the ragged garment of the flesh itself, when,

  beneath the vast and articulate shadows

  of the sai
nts of language, the white dove of genius

  with its quick, wild wings has entered our souls,

  our immaculate ignorance, and we are,

  at last, redeemed. And so is conceived and born

  the thing said, finally, well—nay, perfectly—

  as it might be said by that unknowable Being

  for whom we have in our mortal linguistic

  incapacity no adequate name except the one

  Candi Baumeister bore in her own virginal

  moment of absolute poetry: My God, J.D.

  FROM

  Five Prose Poems

  from the Journals

  of Roy Eldridge Garcia

  Cendrars

  Blaise, Maria, and I were walking toward the Seine from his apartment on the rue Montaigne, and he was speaking of Apollinaire, Captain Lacroix, Abel Gance, and others, his planned biography of Mary Magdalene, his beloved son, Remy, whose plane was shot down in WWII, Blaise’s experience in WWI, the loss of his right arm. And he mentioned the phantom limb sensation, the pain of it, as if the arm were still there, that it is like memory, the memory that will not quite go away, that it is in effect the body’s memory, but more, that is like poetry, the phantom life: not there in any material way, yet intensely there to the reader, the amputee who has lost some nameless yet essential limb of existence, probably on the long, dark path out of childhood. Teary-eyed with excitement, the reader can say of the poem, yes, this is life, or better, this is the life within life, but try to convince the passerby, the onlooker, who will simply observe the empty sleeve flapping in the wind and shake his head sadly. Then he returned to his favorite subject, the levitation of saints, much as he had spoken of it in Le Lotissement du ciel years before, and Paris rose around us as if for the first time—the sun like the oranges of the surrealists plunging into the Seine, the wild applause of the chestnut trees, the truncated towers of Notre Dame—and Maria looked at me and smiled that odd, worried smile that is still with me. Whose pain will not leave. A plane falling out of the sky. That phantom smile.