The Fantasy of Longing to Return to the Soil Cannot Solve the Problem of Man's Rootlessness

THE FANTASY OF LONGING TO RETURN
TO THE SOIL CANNOT SOLVE
THE PROBLEM OF MAN’S ROOTLESSNESS


Frangipani atop Vienna piano, next
To a Vietnamized-made
Rumbled pale yellow sweater,
A scene as if
From an old drawing, velvet-curtained concealed,
Room in an old fiction, as if heated, not cold,
Shirt-sleeved, legislated the flawed spectacle.

The reveries, the reversal of what appeared
As furniture and reverses the present dispensation
In a post-metaphysical, post-foundationist
Condominium twenty miles from
Where broken sea weed golds white-sand beaches.

The talk was of how the word “barbaric”
Came into a Grecian vocabulatury because
He, a Greek, could not distinguish the sounds
Of the materiality of the signifiers
Of an alterity, another language than his own.

So I proposed a propaedeutic to
Colors as spacing of chairs
And a child’s face in Matisse
L’Atelier Rouge. She, who at fourteen
Had been the mistress of a local.
Sixty-two year old talk show host,
Had married at twenty a seventy-eight
Year old who died and left her rich,
Now at age at age twenty-two,
Wanted to talk how in the olden times,
Forty-year old women became fat,
Worn gingham dresses and stirred
With a gigantic steel spoon
In large flat steel pans the syrup
Being made from cane juice
Just squeezed out by a mule
Being forced to move a grinder
By pulling around in a circle a pole.

I told her the story how when I was
Four years old I carried a bleached
Flour sack on my back and picked
Cotton. The thick bolls cut my fingers.
I showed her the scars atop
Each finger by the fingernail,
She kissed each one, asked me,
If I would like to go to Las Vegas with her.
She would pay all expenses.

The scars really came from when I was
Sixteen, drunk on white port, and fell on
A broken beer bottle on the sidewalk
As I came out an “Adults-only-XXX” theatre.


Duane Locke

Posted over on The Sound of Poetry Review