Fraidy Cat's Poetry Corner

[DBP]

 

 Hard Rain

 Tony Hoagland

 

 After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

 played softly by an accordion quartet

 through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale

 Shopping Mall,

 I understood there’s nothing

 we can’t pluck the stinger from,

 

 nothing we can’t turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-

 shirt.

 Even serenity can become something horrible

 if you make a commercial about it

 using smiling, white-haired people

 

 quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes

 in the Everglades, where the swamp has been

 drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf

 course

 with electrified alligator barriers.

 

 You can’t keep beating yourself up, Billy

 I heard the therapist say on television

                          to the teenage

 murderer,

 About all those people you killed—

 You just have to be the best person you can be,

 

 one day at a time—

 

 

 and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a

 little,

 because the level of deep feeling has been touched,

 and they want to believe that

 the power of Forgiveness is greater

 than the power of Consequence, or History.

 

 Dear Abby:

 

 My father is a businessman who travels.

 Each time he returns from one of his trips,

 his shoes and trousers

                      are covered with blood-

 but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;

 Should I say something?

 

                            Signed, America.

 

 I used to think I was not part of this,

 that I could mind my own business and get along,

 

 but that was just another song

 that had been taught to me since birth—

 

 

 whose words I was humming under my breath,

 as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.

 

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[365Stairs]

“Escaped”

The words I’ve spoken

May or May not have been the kindest token

How I said the words I said

May or May not have been what I meant

Why I did the things I did

May or May not have been time well spent

Where I’ve gone to get to here

May or May not have been for fate or fear

Where I’ve been, things I saw, and what I’ve said and done.

Are Reflections of me looking back on you while I’ve been on the run…

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[DBP]

—That’s a good one, 365. Is it your own composition?

*****************************************************************************************

THE ARMORED CAR

by Richard Brautigan

for Janice

I lived in a room that had a bed and a telephone. That was all. One morning I was lying in bed and the telephone rang. The window shades were pulled down and it was raining hard outside. It was still dark.

“Hello,” I said.

“Who invented the revo1ver?” a man asked.

Before I could hang the telephone up my own voice escaped me like an anarchist and said, “Samuel Colt.”

“You just won a cord of wood,” the man said.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“This is a contest,” he said. “You just won a cord of wood,”

“I don’t have a stove,” I said. “I live in a rented room. There’s no heat.”

“Is there anything else you would want besides a cord of wood?” he said.

“Yeah, a fountain pen.”

“Good, we’ll send you one. What’s the address there?”

I gave him my address and then I asked him who was sponsoring the contest.

“Never mind,” he said. “The pen will be in the mail tomorrow morning. Oh, yes, is there any particular color you like? I almost forgot.”

“Blue would be fine.”

“We’re all out of blue. Any other color? Green? We have a lot of green pens.”

“All right, green, then.”

“It’ll be in the mail tomorrow morning,” he said.

It wasn’t. It never came.

The only thing I ever won in my life and actually received was an armored car. When I was a child I had a paper route that went for miles along the rough edge of town.

I would have to ride my bicycle down a hill, following a road that had fields of grass on both sides and an old plum orchard at the end of the road. They had chopped down part of the trees and built four new houses there.

Parked in front of one house was an armored ear. It was a small town and every day after work the driver took the armored car home with him. He parked it out in front of his house.

I would pass there before six o’clock in the morning and everybody would be asleep in the houses. When there was light in the morning I could see the armored car from a quarter of a mile or so.

I liked the armored car and would get off my bicycle and walk over and take a look at it, knock on the heavy metal, look in the bulletproof windows, kick the tires.

Because everybody was asleep in the morning and I alone out there, after a while I considered the armored car to be mine and treated it as such.

One morning I got into the armored car and delivered the rest of my papers from it. It looked kind of strange to see a kid delivering newspapers from an armored car.

I rather enjoyed it and started doing it regularly.

“Here comes that kid in the armored car delivering papers,” the early risers said. “Yeah, he’s a nut.”

That was the only thing I ever won.

 

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