the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, bowling
Number 443, Dec. 5, 2003
Bahadur Shah (Zafar, 1775-1862)
“Mice: How can a writer
train himself?
Y.C.: Watch what happens today. If we get
into a fish see exactly what it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of
it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was
that gave you the emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water
and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or
the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises
were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was
that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader
will see it too and have the same feeling that you had. That’s a five-finger
exercise.”
—Ernest Hemingway, “Monologue to the
Maestro: A High Seas Letter,” Esquire, October 1935
By Jerry LaMartina
It was only the garage, and I hadn’t
lived in the house for 20 years.
I drove back out of North Hyde Park,
headed west and then south on Gillham Road. I’d just been Downtown and decided
to drive through the old neighborhood. I took Charlotte south and then turned
on 33rd Street, wheeled through 15 years of memories, most of grade school, all
of high school, some of college.
I pulled up in front of the house, shut
off the engine and crouched to look at the house through the windshield for a
few minutes. Looked pretty good. Kind of a loud blue with white trim in place
of the mint green and cream trim Mom and Dad had painted it years earlier, but
it looked sound.
The current owners had put up a
chain-link fence in the tiny front yard. They had small children.
I started up the engine and pulled slowly
down the street, looking down the driveway and the long, narrow island next to
the alley. The mimosa was still near the driveway’s entrance, and the yuccas, but
I looked to the back of the driveway toward the garage and saw only trees and
sky. They’d torn it down.
I stopped the car again and looked at the
empty patch at the back of the driveway and saw myself lifting weights on the
asphalt in summer with my brother, the plastic-covered concrete set from Sears
we’d load up with 175 pounds and try to clean and jerk overhead, and the
endless sets of curls we’d trade off on.
Then I was climbing the ladder to the
garage’s attic, sifting through my older brothers’ high school yearbooks,
reading the wise-ass comments their classmates had written to them, sifting
through the wood scraps and old storm windows we kept up there.
Then Dad in his gray ballcap he’d had in
the Navy, standing in the driveway blowing his nose on a handkerchief, drinking
a glass of ice water while Joe and Tom built the back porch, sawing and
hammering, plotting it out loud, laughing, sweating.
I was glad we’d transplanted the fig
trees Dad got through the mail from the backyard to Joe’s house. Those trees
were still healthy and produced fruit.
Before the city tore down Joe’s house and
every other one on his block to make way for the foreign language magnet, Joe
and Bob and Greg and I dug them up on an August morning that hit 90 degrees
before 9 a.m. The rootball must’ve weighed 100 pounds on the biggest of them.
We wrapped them in burlap and drove them to my sister’s, where three
water-filled holes waited for them.
Dad used to take four-foot cardboard
cylinders from the garage attic, each about a foot in diameter, place them over
the fig trees after the leaves fell each autumn and then stuff the cylinders
full of leaves to insulate them. I don’t know where he got those cylinders, but
they kept those fig trees warm.
Today’s poem:
By Bill Bauer
Some ornithologists claim
birds sing because they're happy.
I, too, when happy
preen vibrato;
when sad croon
songs of loneliness and lost loves;
when angry, shriek over
mindless acts of God.
Perhaps birds are happy
because their songs no longer
vibrate through throats
of pterodactyls.
I'm happy not
to croak Cro-Magnon,
but I still can't fly.
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