The Blue Buick

by B. H. Fairchild

  Liberal, Kansas, 1960

  Language

  Elvin in agony: tonnage of a full body

  slam, shoulder into gut, crunch of cartilage

  and bone, or still black dot of a perfect

  spiral thrown level in the flat, receiver

  spun around, held, then ground against

  the grass now turned to stone, a hip bruise

  thickening from pink to burgundy, then black,

  that cruel idyllic meadow ribbed with grave lime,

  white arms of the goal posts cradling the sky.

  But at night Elvin liked to drink, zoned into

  the stereo’s blue glow among piled laundry,

  bottles, books, photos of his mother looking

  like Dolores del Rio as she posed on the beach

  or beneath an umbrella held by a grinning,

  drenched Elvin. With John Prine, mi primo, el poeta,

  he sang about the hole in daddy’s arm, where

  all the money goes, and we kept our distance,

  knowing all he wanted was the bleak purity

  of an empty, darkened room, that blue light

  summoning him somewhere off the common path,

  somewhere serene, undemanding, a little sad,

  like the song itself, like something heard and felt

  from far away, or like the celestial trance

  in Isaacs’s Maria that we read in Spanish class.

  He brought his mother’s language and

  his father’s name from a Texas border town

  and could recite, drunk or sober, and usually

  drunk, that poem by Machado that begins,

  Si yo fuera un poeta

  galante, cantaría

  a vuestros ojos un cantar tan puro

  como en el mármol blanco el agua limpia,

  and ends, . . . vuestros ojos tienen

  la buena luz tranquila,

  la buena luz del mundo en flor, que he visto

  desde los brazos de mi madre un día.*

  He loved the sound of it, light, then heavy,

  then light, like rain, he said. Strange talk,

  which we heard but did not listen to, like

  the crowd’s hunger, their murmur and cry

  at games, or some sort of code or riddle

  spoken in a darkened corner of the bar,

  a lover’s veiled, whispered confession beyond,

  as they say, translation.

  But then someone said,

  Enough of the mother tongue, Elvin, speak it in English,

  and after the ambulance left with the guy bleeding

  from both ears, we just sat quietly and drank

  and let the mystery roll on, pour down, like rain

  pelting chickens in the backyards of south Laredo,

  gutters filled with children playing in the mud.

  Though small, a beast. And those few times

  he sacked the quarterback, looming over him

  like a god in judgment, the jubilation,

  the chenga this and chenga that, was a bit, well,

  excessive, a little weird, madness bubbling

  into childish glee, roaring, arms waving,

  and it worried even us. What the fuck is it

  with Elvin? we would say in wonder, fear,

  and admiration.

  Me gusta? You think

  I like it? I don’t like it, he once said,

  shunning as always the easy comraderie

  of boys at war. The last game, a loss,

  was the worst: an implosion of brick and glass,

  Elvin’s venganza—forehead, fists, cleats pummeling

  the locker doors, slung helmet nailing

  the fullback, Bitsko, just behind the ear,

  this whacked-out, unholy, purple rage

  goading everyone to tie their shoes, fast,

  Get the hell out, now, Jesus, he’s lost it,

  everyone splitting, stone silence even

  from the coaches, just crazy Elvin screaming

  to an abandoned locker room, cursing God

  and all His saints, punching the block wall

  of a world mute as concrete, and the blood trails

  running to the drain were still there Monday.

  Elvin in the hospital that night, singing,

  luz del mundo en flor, que he visto

  desde los brazos de mi madre un dia.

  Adios, gringos, his words as he walked

  toward the bus at season’s end. Back to

  Laredo, his mom, a job at the stockyards,

  and whatever storm was raging in his head.

  I don’t know. You tell me. Rain, he said

  * “If I were a poet / of love, I would make / a poem for your eyes as clear / as the transparent water in the marble pool. . . . Your eyes have / the calm and good light of the blossoming world, that I saw / one day from the arms of my mother.”

  Abandoned Grain Elevator

  after a photograph by Sant Khalsa

  Pausing here, the anchorites of grain:

  woman, girl, a paper angel

  seated on the elevator steps

  where dust from a caliche road

  whitens the woman’s boots. The horizon

  is their god of open spaces.

  The angel mouths silent hymns

  to pass the time the last workers

  bore upon their backs.

  Mice scuttle through the tool shed.

  A JOHN DEERE sign rattles on its post.

  Across the field, a wind-scoured house

  still hugs the ground

  someone’s grandson disked

  before the land was sold, before

  the family moved to Kansas City.

  Below the steps, farm cats doze in bunchgrass,

  the angel lifts its wings,

  and the girl takes up its song,

  May the circle be unbroken,

  by and by, Lord, . . . her voice lost

  in the toiling winds that rouse

  the sleeping earth,

  then lay it back on the shoulders

  of the highway that led them there.

  The Men on Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, 1975

  At 6 a.m. they gather like chattering housewives outside the Goodwill store

  and wait for the latest shipment of women’s wear to arrive.

  They are larger, especially their hands, and happier, too,

  than you had imagined, as if clothing were luck, or the hems of dresses

  they so love to touch held money or the answer to their one secret prayer.

  Close up, you see the shoulders hard and broad under silk,

  and the strong forearms for lifting sofas or luggage.

  Their talk is quick and clever, like the banter of co-eds

  waiting for dates, or excited children whose father

  has been away but has suddenly returned, arms filled with gifts.

  Soon the yellow truck arrives, the truck

  that says GOODWILL in big red letters, and they press closer,

  making those cool, sexual sounds of anticipation.

  When the doors open and the chrome racks are rolled into the alley,

  they do not become the wolves you might expect but rather

  stand shyly by with their hands raised slightly

  as if waiting for permission. The way the clothes come into their hands

  is memorable, like an athletic feat, the outstretched fingers

  and then the ball suddenly, delicately, there. With the whispers

  and rich commerce of blouses, skirts, and lingerie

  passing deftly from one large hand to another,

  it occurs to you, they know each other’s sizes,

  they come often, every Friday morning before the traffic and tourists,

  before the homeless across the street have thrown off their newspapers

  and risen to the tasks of the new day on Figueroa Street.

  You leave
then, and later, strolling back to your hotel,

  you see them lounging in pools of blue neon,

  laughing and singing bits of popular song while seated languidly

  along the curb in feather boas and satin jackets with padded shoulders.

  And as they look up with the bright eyes of the outcast, fear

  strokes the back of your neck, for you are the outcast now,

  remembering the strangeness of stadium lights burning the sky,

  the rattle of shoulder pads, the drumroll of cleats on pavement,

  and the crowd rising and crying out in its great hunger

  as you step onto that field of agony and endless promise.

  Getting Fired

  for Patti

  Drunk now, you turn on some Billie Holiday

  and dance with your wife, who is drunk, too,

  because you called ahead. You say, I have written,

  I have taught, among those who have not.

  Ah, she says, but you did not wear a tie,

  your shoes walked around unshined,

  and your beard refused the loyalty oath.

  Worst of all, your poems were blackballed

  by the DAR. You have failed, my friend.

  Your friend has her hand on the small

  of your back, and you are feeling better now.

  The voice of a woman who knew more pain

  than any ten professors sings of love gone

  wrong and the grace that follows loss.

  The changes in a twelve-bar blues are open

  doors to her, every chord a new way out.

  On a diminished seventh love, she says, love,

  and you pull the blinds, and begin to dance again.

  On the Death of Small Towns: A Found Poem

  from the Seymour Daily Tribune, Seymour, Indiana

  Our little town grows smaller, and news from last week was spare. Here is what I have to pass on.

  Mrs. Josephine Baker of Elizabethtown and Mrs. Inez Loyd of Seymour called at Winklepleck-Weesner Funeral home this past Monday to pay their respects to Kelsa Cockerham.

  I telephoned my oldest daughter, Mrs. Jan Stevenson, at La Porte, Texas, last Thursday evening to wish her “Happy Birthday.”

  Sorry to hear of the death of Wayne Hendershot of St. Petersburg, Fla., who passed away at Bayshore Hospital there. His grandfather, the late Eliza Hendershot, built the house that we moved here to. Wayne used to drive a huckster wagon owned by Raymond Wilson of Surprise. He drove through the community one day a week with about everything you would find in a store.

  Mrs. Frances Hockstetler of Brownstown visited her daughter, Mrs. Marlin Timberlake, last Saturday to help Marlin celebrate her birthday.

  Sorry to hear of the death of Riley Perrin of Lexington, Ky., who passed away at Central Baptist Hospital there Jan. 3. He was the son of the late Dan and Fannie Scott Perrin of Brownstown. Dan ran a shoe repair shop there for many years. I knew Riley when he and his wife were here with his parents for a while just before Mrs. Perrin passed away.

  I received a telephone call Tuesday evening from my youngest daughter, Mrs. Michaelee Nolen, from Anderson.

  I read Dorothy (Perrin) Burns, of Ft. Worth, Texas, has been in the hospital five times in the past year. She is the daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Dan Perrin and a sister to Riley Perrin, who recently passed away.

  I attended the funeral of Kelsa Cockerham at Brownstone First Christian Church Monday.

  Heard a flock of wild geese passing overhead on its way south Jan. 21. It was dark and I couldn’t see them. I stood and listened till I couldn’t hear them anymore. They surely knew

  this cold was coming.

  Leaving

  My Chevy in gray primer, raked, coils cut,

  lake pipes rumbling, and I’m gliding past

  Debbie Lee’s house, then the football field,

  summer bindweed snaking up through

  chicken wire, yard lines blown away,

  the fullback’s father who hasn’t been right

  since Korea waving from his porch swing,

  then 3rd Street and the tin-roofed farmhouse

  like the one in Oklahoma filled with lives that

  made my life: my father tall beside his Ford,

  my mother shy, leaning into him, leaving,

  and now it’s me, MOSELEY’S 66, JIM’S DINER,

  drinking with the Imhoff twins from Hogtown

  who leave next week for boot camp, and good-bye

  to Main Street, the PLAZA, SHORTY’S RECREATION,

  PAUL’S CAFE, where I bussed dishes and fell

  in love with the waitress named LuAnn whose

  light-filled hair came down one night for me,

  but already I was gone, abandoning the lisp

  of wheat stalks, deep fall into star-heaped

  summer nights making love in the torn backseat,

  quart beer bottles floating in the Cimarron,

  cemetery’s circle of Civil War graves where

  we smoked our first weed and sang hymns,

  and the library on Kansas Ave., returning late

  again The Story of Philosophy, Farewell

  to Arms, Winesburg, Ohio, The Razor’s Edge,

  Spinoza’s Ethics, read but hardly understood,

  who am I, what is a life, what is a good life,

  the old questions, words that burn like headlights

  lifting fields of red maize out of darkness and

  me out of darkness three days after graduation,

  sobered up, friends hugged and scattered,

  COTTONWOOD LOUNGE in the rearview mirror

  while ahead wait Plato, Aristotle, Dante,

  Shakespeare, Keats, Melville, Dostoyevsky,

  Fitzgerald, the blue lawn, the green light,

  and a New World called the life of the mind.

  for professors Frank Nelick, Dennis Quinn and John Senior

  Swan Lake

  for Elise Paschen

  My sister led me by the hand

  to the only movie house in Fairfax, Oklahoma,

  where cottonwoods leaned over red-dirt streets

  and the Osage lived in square houses.

  We sat straight up in back-row seats,

  our faces pale among brown skins.

  We listened to strange syllables, stared

  into dark eyes. We were surrounded.

  The awful hush came crashing down

  when an ancient phonograph

  began to grind out Swan Lake.

  From the wings the tallest woman in the world

  stepped the way, I thought, a deer would

  when it is alone. She raised her arms

  and parted clouds. Her body

  swept like rain across the broken stage.

  A pirouette pulled the moon down low,

  and when she leaped, the tide came in.

  Around us rose small sighs and moans.

  We watched an old woman weep

  and hug her shawl. When the music stopped,

  we saw a storm of people, hands held high,

  and heard the sudden thunder of their cry,

  TALLCHIEF TALLCHIEF TALLCHIEF,

  the rumble of their feet against the floor

  like a thousand buffalo beneath a darkening sky.

  Obed Theodore Swearingen, 1883–1967

  This is for O. T. Swearingen,

  who loved bluegrass music

  more than oil in the ground,

  who played Moon and Forty-two

  and shot rabbits farther than I could see,

  whose constant friend was silence,

  who was a stranger in church

  and seldom spoke of God

  but who one Oklahoma morning

  looked down on me, hand on my shoulder,

  his head crowned by the sun.

  Rothko

  Night shift on Rine #4 with three thousand feet of drill pipe

  churning Oklahoma rock, the mud pump’
s wheeze and suck,

  hammer of warped deck plates beneath my boot as I gaze

  from the rig’s north side upon treeless, dustbowl No Man’s Land.

  The moon slithers under clouds that go all sullen and spread

  a great swath of indigo along the horizon, sinking to something

  like the blue-black of threaded iron curling off a machine lathe.

  Below, random bits of scarlet here and there bleeding through

  a silver-gray band of town lights under dust and slung like

  an oil rag over gas stations, bars, a doubleheader at the ball field,

  workers’ homes on the outskirts and lost farms scattered just beyond,

  the house of my grandparents lifting then into memory behind

  the burnished clods of plowed fields. And so five decades later deep

  in the thrall of time’s continuum, here I stand among the Rothkos

  in Houston, city of my birth, thinking of the lives that came before

  in all their colors—bruised blue fingernails, hands and wrists

  gray with grease, jeans streaked with rust-red Panhandle clay—

  and the lives that followed: my children, eyes blue or hazel, that peer

  now into the darkening clouds of a mind drifting toward the far

  horizon of colors, one upon another—kadosh, he might have said—

  what the light gives back, and finally, what it doesn’t. Kadosh.