E-Z Off / E-Z On
SOUTH
Driving North After the Funeral
SOUTH
The Decline of the Greek Revival in Virginia 9
North Carolina 10
Driving North After the Funeral 11
Generals of the Confederacy Reborn in a Little Rock Bar 12
Plantation Row 13
Short History of a Woman with a Tattooed Scalp 15
Dog Eat Dog 18
When I Saw the Swastika 19
This Poem Is Not About Charleston, South Carolina 20
Inner Ear Infection: Union City, Tennessee 21
At the Grand Re-Opening of a Supermarket in Pompano Beach 22
Bay St. Louis 23
True Love Apparent in Idabel, Oklahoma 24
Illegal Alien 25
NORTHEAST
Taking the Kids to Washington, DC 27
"Excuse Me, Is There a McDonald's in Your Historic Little Town?" 28
Annapolis, 1971 29
New Haven Predicament 31
After Learning She Is Pregnant 32
Security Parking, Newark 33
Acrostic / Anagrams: New Hampshire 34
Elegy: Murderkill 35
Allen Ginsberg in Thoreau's Maine Woods 36
Maxine in Her Cups 37
Antique 38
Emerson: Concord, 1882 39
MIDWEST
Mary Ellen Baker Muses While Listening to Sojourner Truth's Speech at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention of 1851 42
Home 43
Meet Me in St. Louis 44
Petoskey 45
Thing 46
Pottawatomie Creek 47
Miscarriage 49
A Plan 50
Council Bluffs, 1959 52
Expectant Father: Bad Trip 53
Television Tower 54
Phillis Wheatley in East Chicago 55
WEST
How I Won the Indian Wars 57
Portland 58
Folly 59
Suburban Ghosts 60
Rocky Mountain Women's Studies 61
Watching a Full Moon Rise Above Scapegoat Mountain 63
Population Centers of Wyoming 64
New Frontiers 65
Kin Song in L.A. 66
The Silver City Motel 67
Taxonomy 68
Snapshot of My Sister and Brother-in-Law 69
Sleeping with Shih Min Lu 70
A welcome sign it is, eight hundred miles
Into a two day drive. Clenched hands relax,
Your lower back slackens. The stiff trials
Of highway travel melt, like candied wax
Left on the dash, when the right exit comes.
A Burger King. A Motel 6. A Shell
Station. They line the frontage road like plums
For the picking. You become your own cell,
Dividing all night until you have fuel
To leave at dawn. With what can be carried
In one suitcase, you start, keen as a boy
In his first car, lover of motion, fool
For life so condensed you might be buried
Alive beneath spadefuls of your own joy.
The Decline of the Greek Revival in Virginia
They lived before the invention of jazz
But men of power then were prescient
They built great columned houses
In their own version of the classical mode
Massive porticoes, iron grillwork
This was the architecture of fear
Of fortresses besieged
Erected against the times to come
When well-dressed white men would stand alone
In Richmond and Petersburg
Clutching fistfuls of change
On dark street corners
While angry black men circled
Waiting for their chance
The age arrived of fires
Stone and brick facades crumbling
And Dread appeared like a new branch of music
Like Coltrane's Ascension
Without apparent precedent
Without climax and resolve
Past the shopping malls of Mobile
Towards the bounty of Birmingham
And beyond, daughters
Squabbling in the backseat:
Their mother guides our traffic like a saint.
Alive in Baton Rouge
She always promised nothing
Less than plenty,
Nothing more than herself,
Hinted each state was a chance
To thresh our needs from wants.
When she died her eyes blossomed
White as dogwoods
And we sold everything,
So that crossing the Escambia
We are a family entirely bound
To time and place.
Even now Mississippi is distant infancy;
Tennessee, an afterlife
We may or may not attain.