Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts
By Alyce Wilson
In yesterday's entry, I mentioned that I incorporated some of the names I gleaned from the Logan Valley phone book into skits and poems.
Here's the poem I mentioned, which I hope will help bring some cooler thoughts to these oppressively hot summer days.
Later Than You Think
I know this is my last second.
I see two vultures, gliding.
As I speed
home over frozen slick, my soul
rises shrieking at every switchback.
stalked the hotel parking lot, shouting,
"Why destroy my truck? Why not just fight me?"
The snow powdered his shirt.
Chatty weather
reports dubbed the storm
Blizzard of '93. Do you remember those talking
heads with fine hairdos? But I wanted the metal
flatness of old-style mics; a black-and-white
catastrophe. Shaky footage of mountain pass.
Sequestered
in West Virginia, I read the Logan Valley
phone book. Names like Marzella, Rexal,
Shallus, Fleavis and Vanita.
The weather
man, in his neat gray suit,
Bryl-cremed, intones: Sixteen foot snowdrifts
sweep across roads, ravishing.
But Romaine and Gustie and Twila and Spicie cool pies;
Dreama and Grafton and Naamar and Purleigh kick back;
Amerigo Bazzie prowls the pass in his rusted-out truck;
Otis Lee Cadd walks his coon to the Zenith showroom
and back.
The footage
shakes, wobbling too fast. A train
rumbles the night; rush of engine. The sexy sky empty
except for fragments. Its ceiling water,
its floors carved by rivers. Grotesque barren blob.
The newscaster mimes distress.
The ascetic
hound
owned by Stormy Dale McCoy
limps along, dragging his leash. Newt Wallen
disappeared last night. (Found next Spring, eating his own
shirt). But John E. Starsick warms
the insides of an ice wall. Anna Rose Ross
has turned blue in there; the two hold
hands until they stiffen. I hit the road for home.
"This
isn't even funny anymore," admits
a trucker on Channel 19. A man holds his baby to see
guardrails bent like tin. Two trucks jackknife into an
impassable diamond; traffic backs up to New England.
When I emerge
from rock gash and static,
the glacier gets me. Rumbles
my car, mashes me like bananas.
The snow crushes this Yankee before I can go home.
Or buy a T-shirt.
Moral:
Even bad experiences have good poems in them.
Copyright
1993-2003 by Alyce Wilson
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