FOUND MATERIAL

(SRO Note : I wrote both of these poems in 1978 when I was 17. I was a freshman at Washington University in St. Louis.)


DIRT ROAD IN FRANCE

My father cornered Henrik Ibsen
in a cafe in Europe
one time.
My father had a steely
way of being smooth
as an icy cloudless sky.
I’m sure he and
Henrik talked of
big things.

My father decided to be a writer
on some dirt road
in France.
But his vision deceived him
and the words
fumbled in his mouth
like refugees
with no place to go.

My father once told me
he hated Henrik
Ibsen for something.
When I saw my father
pressed in his coffin
like a book on a shelf,
I thought
Henrik Ibsen must have led a
shifty, shameless life.


EULOGY

When I first saw this place
I was five,
the clapboard house interrupting the wheat
like a sudden thought.
My brother and I
shot through the fields,
falling grass
hissing around our boots.
The crows called for something shiny.

My father was hit by lightning
high on his tractor.
I was twelve.
My brother carved his coffin
on the back porch,
shavings curling like sleeping cats.

Now that house is forgotten and old.
A man who paints seascapes
told me he got his calling
in a theater in Boise.
As I walk through the fields
down the road to the house,
my calling is lost in
the flurry of the crows.

11:31:41 AM    sro home /