American Dream

 

Published in Summer 1977 Poetry Northwest

Re/collection

“…experiments convinced [Frederic] Bartlett to think in terms not of a static thing called ‘memory,’ but rather a dynamic process of ‘remembering’.  He wrote: ‘Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience… It is thus hardly ever intact.’”

- Oliver Sacks – Hallucinations

The confounded wolf cocked a ragged ear
and attended as the unsucculent saint, palm
upraised, adjured him for the love of God
to lay off the bloody predation,
and bargained the villagers to lay out
regular tidbits to satisfy him
happily ever after. 

The specificity of grey cobblestones and grey
weather, ancient oak doors massive and closed
against unseasonable travelers in this town
where Francisco tamed the wolf, have fractured
into images of themselves and lodged
in my cranial crevices like eels in a reef,
to be coaxed out by the twitching of my pen nib.

Reassembled, these are what I call memories, tempered
by what I learned and felt and turned attention to
that day, apart from what you perceived.
It was the same day and place, was it not, but
our recollections reside individual as sandgrains
in a single beach divided by a headland:

• the desolate canal on Via del Camignano 

• the cable car to the Basilica di Sant'Ubaldo inactive for the winter

• Piazza Giordano Bruno blocked by a funeral procession.

The particulars pass into legend
with retelling, the embellishment
of inexactitudes, truth not
getting in the way of a good story.
The purple bicycle leant against a stone wall,
spangled by raindrops run together  

down the frame to drip, puddle and reflect
the static wheels and seat vacant
below the wind-whipped clouds of Gubbio.
Do you remember?It was Lucca.

Visiting

This poem was written after a trip to Wales in 1996.

Far up the estuary sands two runes 
stoop to rout the muck-besotted clams. 
In bee-sharp rain their shapes are snarls (yes, men,
but of what sort, what age, what … sex?) We know
that code, the squiggle that men make far off,
the motile jot that makes a man. At Dylan's loft

braced all-white against the wooded bank 
like some girl shy at a giddy dance, we see 
such a code unscrambled, broken, cracked:
tilted books and china spaniel on the mantel.
Details like the spots in newsprint pix:
his aged mother's crutches in the crux

of walls look medieval, oak and leather
a barbaric prosthetic, next plumped yet meager chairs.
Colors withered. The knick-knacked rainlit room
fills with his recorded chanting. And down
the conker-strewn lane, the blue Boat House's floor
holds crumpled sheets of paper, Dylan's words 

we assume, wadded within like blasting powder
awaiting detonation. Here the mysteries 
of the river Taf, the water sandbrown as a pipit, 
down to Laugharne castle, up through sheepy hills
beaten by a shroud of rain, cromlechs 
(trees?) across the bay, aslant, reflect

all traversed his mind and out his pudgy hand.
The squiggles the man made way off in that 
other time. 

An hour away, my scrawling 
fills a book amid the cairn-topped hills 
and skittish pendulous rams, the howling calves,
the moos of autumn gale. From nearby Nevern

Saint Brynach often climbed to Carningli's top 
where Bronze-age men had set their cryptic stones, 
and he communed with angels. What did their visits
prove? The cloudful ocean shimmered, woods 
wheatwaved in seawind. Could he or they detect
the farmers pacing fields behind the flecks

of oxen? Opposite Brynach's Mount of Angels,
bathed in sheep-black mist across the valley, 
slabs of boggling weight sleep on each other 
at Pentre Ifan, five thousand years on their ferny
quilted hill. What we know is someone 
kept the dead inside these stones and covered 

them with more. We've solved that but we suffer
still the rune of death. The graveyard peppered 
with slate stones etched in impenetrable Welsh.
Their fishflat faces going slowly blind
by beastly weather, the squalling past and future. 
At buzzard dusk, the strapping lad and pooch

herd in the cows, spot-curdled and deliberate.
This is no legend but prosaic capitalism.
His father's father and et cetera worked these slopes,
may well have raised Pentre Ifan's rocks, or lain there;
his name, Lewis, gluts god's acre at Cilgwyn. 
We see the pointillism of dairy life, of Cymru, 

the lovely lambs that go to feed the folk, 
the cattle frothy at their stalls to ease 
balloonpink udders while, next our tidy house, 
calves loudly hunger in the stone-walled byre.
Maybe we’re the angels, having flown
this far, looking well on these old towns.
 
We saw his china dog and blessed it, bought 
postcards to keep the shrine lit up and healthy.
By our false but cozy fire we lunched,
last looks from farmhouse windows at Carningli,
and I left my erodable code on paper thin
as Dylan used, one foot each on earth 

and infinite. Then up the cow-wide track 
we drove toward fog-runed sheep gone loose on rocky 
soil. Here there was no view, no distance,
little future, just an endless dusk. 
I could hear the clipclip of front teeth
visiting threadthin grass below the megalith.

            Published in Jack Mackerel