Free verse № 100028
Gothic
We used to say about him he
came flying north, just like he was
on wires, like some backwards gravity.
And once here he found he couldnât go back
south again because
a fear he had â of finding his black
motherâs body in the garage, eyes
tedious with indictment, damp dress
rucked up on her big mushroom-skin thighs
and coquettish for a sonâs caress,
leaned like sleep against some late-
model Buick, idled into emptiness:
That old rot-sweetness of tragedy, straight
out of our puritan wet-dreams. No, we weren't surprised
when it finally happened, but to him instead
and hanging in the place of gas: a tie
slung from a walk-in closet rod
in some sterile air-conditioned real estate
uptown, and his drunk undefeated grin, old red
clay on his dragging Oxfords, and a god
too proud or gone to let them catch his weight.
14 comments
I like the cadence of it, first off.
"backwards gravity" got it, like it - falls up (geographically).
then an image of the black mother (had to look up "rucked") making sexual advances (I see...)
I liked the car "idled into emptiness"; left running - good.
I wasn't able to associate with the rot-sweetness of tragedy or the puritan wet-dreams, but I understood it to be a description of something that may be a demographic universal.
then there's the suicide scene (is it?) - which I think is a little rushed - or perhaps too complex. I liked the red clay on the shoes - does this mean she's been buried? Made me think so, anyway.
I guess I'm not sure what exactly *is* going on in those last two-odd stanzas. A bit more sculpting maybe?
I suppose on the most straightforward level, the mother is the betrayed motherland, which is how we actually think of it down here. Yes, we are a sick, sad people. Haven't you ever read any O'Connor? She's my thesis, by the way. And that, too, strikes me as faintly sad and absurd right now.
The clay is on his Oxfords from his youth in the South. The mother's not really dead. Oxford is, incidentally, the Mississippi hometown of Faulkner.
It is a little light in the sense department, but I give you the benefit of the doubt - don't make me regret it.
My solution: I'll try not to post more bum crap.
A: No, because you're gay!
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