i'm no one's idea of a poet, but i've been thinking about writing an
article and this is the way that it turned out. so i thought i would send
it along :-)
gary shank
shank@duq.edu
PUTTING TOGETHER A READING LIST FOR MY SYLLABUS
--- 17 February 2000
--- Gary Shank
--- shank@duq.edu
I.
You remind me that our evening skies were flyash gray
But I remember many clear pale blue afternoons.
Where were we?
Down at the far end I see the white stucco box of the Saint
Matthew's Church Parish House.
At our end, between our green bank and the yellow clay mud rut
driveway,
Was our gnarly snarled wire fence.
To the left edge was the iron rail fence and the Gate and the sidewalk
and Norwood Road.
At the right edge, where the lawn dropped sharply down
Into wild honeysuckle and cedar and scrub maple
Was "the woods."
Caught between these boundaries, in the memory cube of space,
Was the cemetery.
II.
We played Whiffle Ball Home Run Derby here in my Grandma's front
yard.
One person stood behind our fence, in the cemetery,
To catch and throw back the ball.
Down here at our end there were only a few graves.
Most of the honored and ancient dead took their rest in the shadow of
the Parish House.
Back here were the two little girls
Each with her own white marble obelisk
And the fresh earth mound of "Chewing Gum" Harry Carwithen
Another Army vet whose trajectory took him well past the battlefield.
These graves were far apart and easy to dodge
When you were shagging Whiffle Balls.
And no one could possibly crush a Whiffle Ball hard enough
To reach the solitary giant pine that stood sentry
Over the Grandfather I never met
Or my tiny Aunt Marjorie or my tiny Uncle No Name
Or my Uncle Nelson, slain by a runaway Fascist elevator in Italy,
And where my Grandma Sadie
Watching us from her living room window
Would herself soon enough lie.
III.
Every hospital I ever saw, when I was a kid
Had a big smokestack somewhere.
We kids told each other ---
This is where they burned all the stuff left over from operations
Or where they took that lost leg
Or that lost arm, or that lost eye
Where they took all these little pieces, bizarre and disconnected,
And turned them into smoke and ash
And then they were gone.
And the dark adult inside each one of us told the others ---
This is where they cornered the Frankenstein monster
And the Wolfman, and the Zombie
And they burned them all to a crisp.
And this is where bad parents take their dead babies
And pitch them into the pulsing bank of fiery coals.
You bury your dead.
You incinerate your mistakes.
IV.
I have held a box full of human ashes.
I was surprised how dense it felt
How substantial, which was strange
Since the wind picked up the ash easily enough
And now he is gone.
And I am struck by the thought that the two little girls
With their white marble Whiffle Ball obstacle course stones
Would be barely into their Fifties today.
Had they died today
Would they find their way into little dense redwood boxes?
Would they clutter the wind for a moment and then vanish?
V.
Did I forget to introduce myself?
I work for a university.
We have never been busier here.
Part of my job is to teach people to forget.
A lean memory is an efficient memory.
And it is a full time job turning a cemetery into a crematorium.
Have we really cluttered our landscape with too many headstones?
We help each other create electronic smoke that swirls and is then
blown away.
And then there is the other half of my job.
I am also paid to understand.
But how can I hope to resuscitate the saints and martyrs of reason
When one grassy mound looks like any other?
How can I hear your story
When you have burned away the overtones and the harmonics of your
ancestors?
And how can we play Whiffle Ball
When we are standing on a ragged black cloud?
***
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