Mark Sanders creative nonfiction

Homecoming Parade

(first published in Permafrost; nominated for Best American Essays 2015).

· The Assembly ·

July 1970. My parents stand on a Main Street curb in Creighton, Nebraska, out front of Manion’s Drug Store. They hear high school girls inside, chattering like birds in a backyard garden; turn to watch them through the window, sipping fountain Cokes and cherry floats. Blonde and brunette heads gossip about the Bulldogs letterman at the magazine rack, eyes locked his direction. They giggle to draw his notice from Hot Rod. He hears them, of course, but plays it cool; shifts his weight from one leg to the other, flexes calf muscles exposed by cut-off jeans, turns a slick page. His game: increase advantage by letting them believe he finds something more important in chrome headers and Candy Apple Red hardtops. The girls’ silly giddiness spools out the pharmacy’s entrance and mingles with the noise elevating on the sidewalk. Unimpressed, my parents turn their attentions back to the street, to gawk at others who also crowd the curb.

Where had all these people come from in such short time? Some, seated on webbed lawn chairs, kick off shoes to sip the cement’s heat. Some emerge from doorways of Western Auto, the Five and Dime, George’s Clothing. At window fronts, faces appear and disappear like ghosts. What the reflection, what the person? From nowhere, the people come to the parade: the row houses near the tracks and the Victorians adjacent the old high school. The dried-up, windblown farms where wheat struggles and sows with pigs eat thistle to the nub. The little towns that dot the plains.

Come old men in bibbed overalls, old women in gingham, heads scarved.

Come families toting children who squeal and kick and bawl, tears streaking filthy faces.

Come those lonely, hungry ones who have not seen each other for years, months, weeks, days, passing greetings like sticks of Beech-Nut gum. Speech after silence. Their eyes devour each other. It is right. Every word a smacking of lips. Winter long past: blow and pillage of blizzards, ache of zero, of numbness, of any misery in the sound of the wind. The survivors have returned, all bearing wounds. It is right. Heat swirls and Main Street faints into mirage pool. Already the shade sought for, the hands that fan faces, the eyes fixing on recognitions.

My parents do not watch for me. It is right.

They know where I am.

Fifteen, in a hurry, I do what young men do with new freedoms. Last year, they watched. It mattered. Last year, the year before, the year before that, when I stood on the street curb within my parents’ reach, shy inside the crowding, yet attentive to the humdrum conversation: rain, dry, corn, blanch, howya, long and time. And: “Hey, boy, I knowed your grandma. Hey, boy, she was quite the woman.” I endured pats to head or shoulder, felt grime in grips as the speakers pumped my hand. I sensed the wrongness of the exclamation, and, not understanding, wished for invisibility. “She was the town whore,” my aunt informed me years later. “Your dad was a bastard and Grandpa didn’t want your mom to marry him.” How did such statements affect my dad who stood by and half-smiled? All his life my father wanted to be bold. I could have escaped, run to the corner to drink from the water fountain, gazed down Clark Avenue toward the carnival that anticipated riders for the Ferris wheel, the kiddie coaster, the Tilt-a-Whirl. I admired the suckering sweet-talk of carnies—the stump-the-weight-guesser, the ball throw and dart throw vendors—at booths where red, orange, purple balloons bumbled in hot breeze. You wouldn’t have been a thought or speck if Grandpa’d had his way.

But, all that time ago, I awaited the parade’s end in the swell and fester of adults. Inexplicably troubled by what I saw or heard or overheard, I listened and watched the more intently. Then, flush with birthday cash deep in my short pockets, for tickets and cotton candy, salty pretzels and root beer floats, I raced down Clark to join the revelers there. More like . . . flying from something that he dreads, than one who sought the thing he loved. Quarters and half-dollars jingling like keys in pockets. Caramel corn, hot dogs and vanilla cones. I’d find my cousin Melodee or some pleasant, willing stranger who permitted friendship for a ride or two. I never rode alone. Always enough aloneness the rest of the year. Smoke and grease and butter, salt and sweat. Body odor like canned tuna. Voices raised against the din—no matter if joy or anger, drunkenness or stone sobriety. The midway not unlike the home we knew: brome and foxtail, black-eyed Susans, yucca along the rusted fence lines, the gray and knotty twists of fence posts where sit the trilling birds: meadowlark, redwing, oriole, finch; the windmill groaning as it worked—the beautiful particularity in that and this and this, this, and this. Come, too, the commodity of music. Come, too, something like prayer: anything less than all good, is vicious.

But that was the last homecoming, last July.

That was homecoming before the last homecoming, the July before the last July.

I have self-taught and taught exclusion, and my parents, lessoned, have given up their watch to search themselves for misplaced years when, as children, they played a part in the parade, staring out from the window of the Five and Dime where they bought penny candies, gums and licorice babies. Dad rolled metal cars and trucks over wooden counters; Mom cradled dolls and stuffed bears and dogs, longing something permanent. He would drive the real thing, someday, gears engaged, motor rumbling, and his heart each mile became more the wooden counter. She would marry a boy someday; they would have children, someday, maybe a broad tree that cast shade upon a porch, places for the flowers to bloom their lies. These the things kids dreamed of in the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s, what they did, what I dreamt the next decade and its next. What do kids dream today? The dreams became, if not a succession of disappointment, an obligation and show of inconvenience. Perhaps, my parents had visited the same store at the same time or stood on the same curb and watched a parade in tandem and never knew they had. Discovering took time. All these years later, still time. Toys they lost interest in became more valuable than themselves. Ghosts in the windows are the kids they were.

Knock the glass out!

My God—glass, my townspeople!

For what purpose? Is it for the dead

to look out or for us to see

how well he is housed . . . ?

There had never been any great pleasure. The Rock-O-Plane tipped them upside down and change poured from their pockets. The heat that rises in swirls off Main is evidence of their passing. Life’s dim window . . . distorts the heavens.

And today, on the sidewalks, other kids hang bawling from their parents’ hands, little monsters pulling to get away, brats begging treats from the Five and Dime, the Coke from Manion’s. My parents don’t remember this. I was a good kid they tell. Taught well: Children should be seen, not heard. Hiding behind legs. Hands, to myself, stuffed in pockets. Eyes averted. Let me look when no one looks my way. Better times, then, than the present grief. Not a thought, not a speck.

The Beatles and War and marches at Birmingham or Washington or Berkeley have altered the way we come home. My parents speak their new faith, a doctrine of fear, at all assemblies. My father prepares for the invasions—of disease, of frailty, of his mother’s pre-death dementia; he is certain these will conquer him. My mother believes the Russians will bomb; she will march to the porch to meet the fire and, if her children are at her disposal, she will lead them to the tilting deck. Extreme gusts will blow out fire and all. So what, then, that university students seize the coliseum building at the University of Nebraska? What if Kent State? How different really was the Great Depression, the Dirty Thirties, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Nagasaki? The death march at Bataan? The winter of ’48 and ’49, or of 1888, barefoot kids holding teachers’ hands and traversing drifts? Destination sits hidden around a corner; the winds he holds inside his coat, the spiritless libations tucked in his pockets, he will share soon enough. My parents study scars and sagging and watch the approach of the Children’s Crusade. The barker cries, “Find the ghost in the window and win your way home!” But everyone loses at the carnival; the prizes—kewpie dolls and pandas stuffed with sawdust—are never worth what we spend on effort.

The noise on the streets is the same as always, the people as they have always been.

Farmers and merchants and little old ladies, their hair in curlers covered in scarves—talking heads impaled upon posts of weather, of family, of the topical. The preponderant, glacial weight of the year’s silence. Come we home to parades and carnivals because home is the burden we cannot abandon, all the hope we ever had here. But the glacier moves and melts and the terrain is inconstant. Up and down Main, erosion washes flat the paint of storefronts, pales the bricks, grimes the friezes that note construction, 1896 or 1901, or boast ownership, Willoughby or Rice. The years lost, the owners long dead, the buildings, diminished as they are, prevail. Drought and dust prevail. God’s proof of eternity through impermanence. Epiphany is wrinkled foreheads and gray hair. Behind the old voice is a surprised but young face in the window glass. Knock out the windows! Metaphor is youthful beards and radical haircuts, braids and long straight hair, down past the shoulders. The part never wholly the whole. Johnny White Eagle, drunk and crawled half-way up a light pole, his raven hair falling down his back, is every synecdoche. What is his tribe or anyone’s tribe? My parents want old times, and that wanting hits them center. You’d think they’d hold hands, and, in the sympathetic, shared anxiety, discover love enough to retain this moment, fresh as memory, regardless the trope that etches their faces.

Let such thoughts litter the curb like gum wrappers and bottle caps. When the parade is over, the street cleaner comes beating its circular brush, the sound like jug jug jug. The street cleaner delivers its verdict. Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

It is right.

· Momentum ·

Come another noise, less bravado than the knock in the chest. Thrum-thrum, thrum—hypnotic, not painful, thrum-thrum, jolting the crowd as if, thrum, thrum-thrum, something, thrum sucked away the air. Thrum, the beat’s heavy deliberateness. But the heart beats off rhythm. Do not mistake the heart’s trifling as “thrum.”

The cadence is the Creighton High School marching band’s, three bass drums beating thrum, the note that notes the parade’s commencement. The band turns onto Main from School Street three blocks away. My parents lift to tiptoes, stare over heads, lean out over the curb, teetering. Stepping off would be a fall from a cliff, though children, aged four and five and six and eight and fourteen, standing on tiptoes, too, don’t understand cliffs, don’t know about headlong plunges. Instead, they scramble unworried, out into the street to watch the band’s approach. Thrum, thrum-thrum. Snare drums intensify, and the band’s centipede feet stamp black shoes dressed over in white spats, the uniforms white and red, gold braids and columnar hats sporting equipage of red plumes.

And: Onward the parade.

First, the bright red, brand new Creighton Volunteer Fire Department tanker truck, siren sounding like a collision, followed by the ambulance’s cacaphony. Come the baton twirlers, the blonde one wearing pearl-rimmed glasses, the baton a blur like an oscillating fan. She kicks high, says, “Ouch, I hurt myself.” There’s a boy who is me watching out the Pool Hall window, his face haloed by one of the O’s in the white paint of POOL. He notices: on this side of the glass, the word is a backwards LOOP, how he had written in kindergarten, the left-handed defiance. Without Contraries is no Progression. There’s a placard hanging nearby, says OPEN, a penguin smoking, the advertisement: IT’S KOOL INSIDE. Waiting for his friend to take his shot, a stripe to a side pocket, a stripe to a corner, he spins the words around: NOPE; SIT, LOOK, SIN, DIE. He watches the crowd watching, near enough the front door, open to noise and heat, that he can hear the baton twirler’s exclamation. She passes and she limps on her right, blonde leg. Her white shoes are high tops. If one could simply fall off now, he would rush to its rescue. The brass—the trombones, the trumpets, the tubas—swing to “Viva Bossa Nova.” My parents may have wished me in the band, one wish among many, marching in step, in step with the rest, rehearsed, drumming, stovepipe hat low over my eyes to obliterate right, left. The one course forward.

Come now the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Korean corps, the World War II corps, the World War I corps, all in uniform, some burgeoning, some baggy, some threadbare. Two Boy Scouts push a lone man in a wheelchair—he’s old, old, reduced to bone, a tattered coat upon a stick, but what is his war?—and behind those three the other Boy Scouts, the Cubs, the Girl Scouts, the Brownies, the Camp Fire Girls; and behind them, the summer camp youth groups of the Presbyterian and Lutheran churches. The Ladies Auxiliary totes white wicker baskets full of blossoms; petals blow from their fingertips. Red, pink, white, purple, and yellow. Sweets to the sweet, Getrude lied to drowned Ophelia. Had they been flower girls when they were little, paving paths to the altar? And, having led the procession before, why do they now follow?

And what about my father? He fought in the South Pacific, keeps a handful of medals and dog tags in my mother’s jewelry box. An islander’s coolie hat, Dad’s duffel, a bag of puka shells hang on the back porch. In the attic, his dress uniform dangles from a nail. In a trunk, he keeps photographs of buddies and bare-breasted native women. He does not talk about the war. He does not march. He has never marched.

And my mother’s brother, Bob, a tank gunner in Korea: he’s doors down, coming out of the Bullpen Tavern, just to take a peek, to salute the color guard though the snap is out of his arm. He ducks back inside for another round of Hamm’s, the Beer Refreshing. The sun’s too bright, the heat piercing. He will watch a panoramic lamp spit images of islands and palms onto plaster walls yellowed by smoke, the blips and winks of neon, the drifting of shadows east to west. He will never march again.

Where are the veterans from Vietnam? The walks are crowded with new heroes, incognito. Look around. Some in green fatigues, but most in blue jeans and black or blue or red T-shirts, some in white but stained with sweat. Some mute the Conflict with plaid Bermudas and pastel golf shirts. None march. Do they need an invitation? Beards, mustaches, muttonchops veil their faces, almost in tears to know how to speak the right language. Hard smiles and steadfast gazes no longer suffice as masks. Behold the brown-faced men—each group, each person, a picture. The veterans diminish; fewer than the last parade, fewer than the year before. Who will replace them when they are gone?

Now here come, here come, here come pretty girls riding horses, grays and bays prancing and stamping away nervousness, the less experienced riders unconfident behind worried smiles. Clothed on with chastity? The deep air listen'd round them as they rode, and all the low wind hardly breathed for fear. White-knuckled grips pull reins short, bits deep in the horses’ jaws. Stay off the faces, girls. Don’t make your horses’ mouths hard. One of the riders is the Santee Reservation Queen, tall beauty in her saddle, her hair longer than history. She wears a white cowboy hat adorned with peacock feathers, a western buckskin pant suit with hand-sewn sequins, the complexion of the times. There are road apples for the next bands to tramp through, the mandate consistent among band directors: do not veer the path. Onlookers anticipate the fatal steps, wince and laugh when the apples bloom. What else to do?

I watched the girls.

I smiled at the baton twirler as she kicked her leg and thought about her during long, solitary hours spent in the corner of my bedroom, sitting on my bed, reading or drafting an early effort at words. I had seen weeks after the parade a photo of the Indian queen in the paper, dead in a car accident, and imagined broken glass like sequins, a meadowlark’s trill light as feathers lilting on breeze. She had waved as she passed us, and I realized I had not waved back.

I grieved about departures, the turning of sharp corners, and listened to an old phonograph spinning a new record, Janis singing,

                        Summertime,
                        Child, your living's easy.
                        Fish are, fish are jumping out,
and reread old books about old wars and old loves. The guitar was the ambulance’s siren, and every step that anyone had ever walked in a parade the fingering of chords.

What, what, in the parade could ever be dispensable? Even the horse manure, like land mines, exploded, beautifully and terribly, and altered all.

                        One of these mornings
                        You're gonna rise, rise up singing,
                        You're gonna spread your wings, child,
                        And take, take to the sky,
                        Lord, the sky.
Lord, the sky. The air was a phrase punctuated by cranes and geese, music was clouds and strings of light, and what the air kept a stirring of bells. I heard tree limbs scratching against the roof above my head; the earth lay over me, a tunnel caved in, and something was digging me out.

Come, next, Jess Tepner’s Chevy and Buick caravan, horns resounding: the Corvette Stingray, the Chevelle, the Impala, the Riviera, exotic and necessary. My parents will visit the showroom, act that they will make a deal to take a drive, then buy a used Ford in another town. I buy my own used car the year after that, learn to drive fast on narrow highways and graveled roads, not as if running from phantoms but as in pursuit of the necessary. High, so high, the car afloat. Candy flies from car windows. Children spill and splash from the curb and scramble for Bazooka bubblegum, peppermint swirls, cinnamon hard candy, toffee rolls; like crows falling on seed in unturned plow rows. Then, fly back to parents. As I had done years in succession. A yoyo: string attached, out I snapped, spinning for candy, my bald blondness shining with sweat; and in I came, flick of the wrist, to parental presence. The parents’ son grew past them, frayed strings breaking. We rarely spoke. We could not. Babel tumbled, our languages our own. We live on impossible plains, and the iniquities of our fathers proceed before us in new combines, new tractors pulling new discs and new tillers. Savor the new implements, the industrious tools. Come, forage wagons and augers with brontosaurus necks, flatbed International trucks hauling 4-H kids holding lambs and dogs, cradling wire crates of chickens and rabbits, fanning banners of cornstalks and sunflowers, fanning their names: Busy Bees, Valley Riders, Merry Miras, the Beetles.

My mother’s mother stands on the opposing side of Main, waving a white handkerchief at the children who are nothing of hers, her pale blue dress with the yellow flowers too young if unfashionable for the wrinkled lady who shrinks before our eyes. Does she wave hello or goodbye, get older or younger? And Mom’s unmarriageable sisters, in pallid yellows, teachers on summer break, hide under the awning of the Women’s Apparel, fanning themselves with magazines or flat pocketbooks. They care nothing for the children; they are here because it was an expectation, like sums and differences, like words that must be spelled, histories that must be examined.

We have not seen Dad’s people. They’re all dead, all gone, in the cemetery down Clark Avenue, past the carnival midway, past the Catholic church at the north edge of town. The asphalt turns to gravel there and the path into the cemetery makes one big loop in and out again.

Again, again, the farmers in the drivers’ seats sow candy, and the kids hop from curbs to dance in the sweet rain. This is how to age. First, the babies always within reach; next, testing boundaries, as if the curb is flush to road, no traffic on the approach, no marching band playing cavalcades or soldieries that make children march, step by according step, into the ranks of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The foreign wars are very close to home, in living rooms, in kitchens, in bedrooms where the tired child may not care to rise the morning after a football game to do chores for his father. “Get up, you lazy turd,” he growls. “You going to sleep your life away?” The habit of marching comes early. Come the compliant, come the lectures of fathers who would put rifles to their sons’ shoulders, who would make widows of daughters. Silence after speech. My father says I will go to Vietnam, I will not evade the draft, the war will not stop. I sing Sweden to see him angry, Olaf, proud and true. My mother says I should not provoke him so.

I here declare the end of the War!
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let Congress legislate its own delight
let the President execute his own desire.

Come my mother’s tears as many as percussion notes. Come silence every altercation, like a last beat on a bass drum. The beauty of innuendo; the beauty of inflection. It is right.

On come the oncoming floats and the bands from Wausa, Verdigris, Niobrara, Crofton, Winnetoon, O’Neil, Norfolk, Neligh. On slugs the flatbed trailer hauling Jim Exon, Nebraska’s governor; hauling Carl Curtis, Republican senator; hauling John G. Neihardt, Poet Laureate of the state. Why the poet? Because he writes a romantic West in heroic couplets, glorifies a past that rode a warhorse painted with hailstones and handprints. It might have sufficed that Sitting Bull and Jim Bridger and Crazy Horse had stories plain enough to tell. Must they be Odysseus, Agamemnon, Oedipus? Sing, though, the hero,

borne along,

A sagging bundle, dear and mighty yet,

Though from the sharp face, beaded with the sweat

Of agony, already peered the ghost.

The Badlands surround us. The night is one litany of coyotes and owls. Sing,

the day-long sorrow of the crows,

These many grasses and these many snows.

Sing, as well, the melt that memory is. The parade like floods of little water becomes littler water. There’s a drought, and sometimes little water is like that note heard in the just after. Heroes and children evaporate. The band rounds a corner. The music dissipates.

· Scattering ·

So much time expires between one turn at the pool table and the next.

I stand at the O in POOL, and the white figure of it looks like a smoke ring blown from my mouth, and a voice in the ring is God’s:

There is nothing new under the sun.

It was here already, long ago;

It was here before our time,

A chasing after the wind.

Belleweg’s Pool Hall, brown shadows, a thick, smoky haze perfumed with sweetness of flavored pipe tobacco, of cigars, of Menthol. A darkness save the lights above the tables. Cue sticks stand in racks along gray walls. Old men and younger men sit clustered on discarded church pews, swilling pop, sipping beer. They are the guardians. There are three doors, one to the back alley, one to Main Street and the spectacle, and another to the basement where a dying generation plays cards, murmur of German and Polish, wie geht’s, jak se mås. How many wrinkles on a face equal a year? Wie viele Faulten im Gesicht gleichen einem Jahr?

Evidentiary earth tones and low voices, grumbling soil. Was ist aus meinem Leben geworden? Nothing so sharp as the parade outside would make life seem.

The parade is not true. Only our need of it is.

True is the sepia photograph of the naked woman on a calendar page that should have been turned two years ago. A cigarette burn tattoos her thigh, but her smile is permanent, her gaze deep and brown and permanent. Were she an angel, you would willfully go to heaven. You pray there are such angels. It would be a sin to turn the page.

True is a sign tacked to the wall, listing left: “No Boisterous Talk.” And another, across the room, above the pop machine, warns, “No Cursing. No Profanity. No Obscenities.” Bragging and gossip lock lips with the offensive. Signs are cheap and no one heeds prophecy. What paradise would we lose? No women come into the pool hall, and the men drop verbal bombs every minute. False is the sign in the window, the Kools- smoking penguin.

True is the dozing old dog lying at the open back door, cooling in the fan breeze. True the fan above that door, whirring incomprehensible vernacular. True that we pray for heavens where brown angels smile for all eternity. True that we envy the dog’s leisure. We come to the pool hall, click-clack of billiard balls colliding, to emulate the old dog dozing. True the quiet to ruminate, the space we can shoulder without strain.

Today, I am the people’s hero.

I slide my cue through the cradle of fingers, forward and back and long and slow, something sensual, something prayerful. A shot requires exactitude, deliberation, meditation—as if with rifle at a deer in a clearing, awaiting the bullet; as if an ashen soldier senses but does not see the sniper in the wrecked tower a hundred yards away. “There’s always a bullet with your name on it,” my uncle told me. “The trick is keeping out of the sights.” But the trick is avoiding all the bullets addressed to Whomever It May Concern. My father’s bullet is his retirement; my uncle’s cancer in the bone. They slept; they kept out of sight. Bullets flew nonetheless, indiscriminately, shrieking past. Can’t you hear them even now, just after?

The cue ball strolls the green felt. Click and clack like footsteps. Enough holes to accommodate the balls that drop. Holes enough for all to step in.

Click and clack. Another kill-shot. Das Spiel ist fast vorbei. The game is nearly over.

What do I know at fifteen, in 1970?

That stop signs in small towns mean, “Slow down, look. Do not stop unless accident bears down upon you.”

True is chores uncompleted, muscles straining against heavy gates, under heavy loads of shingles up ladders to steep roofs. Strain is the measurement of accomplishment, including what is unaccomplished. The question: “What have you done today?” The answer always: “Not a damned thing you’d understand or value.” Even nothing may be quantified. Even nothing is not true. True is the dissatisfaction.

True: I slip quarters into the cigarette machine and buy a pack of Marlboros. The pack is soft; I prefer a box. I do not enjoy smoking. It is something I do because I can. It will be something I quit because I can. True: because I can, I quit many things I do not enjoy. I do not enjoy what my family would have me be. True, they watch the same parade as I do. True, I collect it and take it home. They pop it in their mouths where it dissolves like sugar, like a day, but for me it does not dissolve.

True: I lean across the table, the cue cradled in bend and arch and hammock of fingers smooth and shiny. I squint through smoke that rises from my cigarette. I straighten to wipe sweat from my forehead with the short sleeve of a white t-shirt. Then, back to cue, rock-a-bye in the cradle. The last solid banks off the left cushion into the right side pocket, smoke to my mouth, inhale, exhale. Shield my smile. Never let the opponent see pleasure. Why provoke? Now the eight ball. Call the corner.

So difficult is the straight-on shot. In high school math we are taught the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. No one ever told us we cross the distance in a line we walk heel to toe, as in a sobriety test. Even sober, such straightness guarantees stumbling. Outside, come the parade and many lines marching to a vanishing point. The band plays, sirens howl, dogs along the street-side howl, kids howl their excitement and scramble after pittances flung to the asphalt, while all the pretty girls upon their pretty horses, all matter so deeply, deeply much. For them, actuate the cue ball’s sure spot. For them, even if they should not giggle for me at the soda fountain. For them, devotion to fluidity, dismissal of brute motion. For them, the silence of the cue ball rolling the length of green felt, kiss of confliction, white to black, the falling, like love, into a pocket where grief might not dwell.

Heroic man in the noisy pantomime. That’s who I am. Wars enough to fight even here, racked balls broken from perfect triangulation, the chaos of solids and stripes no less the originary violence of the universe, the player like God putting it to order. How old men admire well-spun English, impossible shots executed. How necessary for a kid to feel such admiration as, “Our hero will be like smoke among the smokers.” But these are words I have for myself. This is what I tell myself:

The old men need me.

So, build for them a joint next door and buy them draughts and let them talk for all the hours anyone might care to listen.

And the young men, worn out and fatigued by tours of duty in jungles, years in the cornfields, seeking comfort from the sun, mist when it will not rain, fashion for them unlidded boxes.

Middle-aged men in debt to wives and children and livestock, encumbered to whatever lock-steps to their mailboxes, up their driveways, journeys their front yards and perches upon their porches where swings move imperceptibly in imperceptible wind, anticipate what they need.

True is the deed on all their properties, mortgage the buzzard circling. Quotidian the distance seen from the field’s middle. I will remind them, as they stand at the field’s center, that the bird winging above them measures merely the quotidian arc. Center is inconstant. The pretty girls on pretty horses all waved to me, the baton twirlers kicked their legs in joy of me, the women sitting on the backs of convertibles blew me kisses like pieces of candy that I would fall lightly to catch. But they also did so for any man who might worship them.

Come me out of a building, pass me through a door, arrive me on a sidewalk or by a table in the park, just at the right moment, in the nick of the nick of time, I will tender a trueness like smoke. If the day is long and dark, the sun out of it, low clouds drear in treetops, mizzle on sidewalks, and if I wear that day long and dark on my face, all those I wake will know that wind—washing clear the sullen smear—follows after me. True, I tipple the elm and maple leaves, shiver the sweet gum. I see, watcher that I am, that they watch, after all. Come that wind. Scatter leaves white as paper.

Come my parents, the old folks, the oddly suspicious about everything. I will not disappoint them. They know their failures. Failure is all that matters. I will fail them and so will not disappoint them. Letterman in the pharmacy, there is not enough alphabet to prescribe the cure for you or the girls who imagine you inside them. The drum major has lost his brassy whistle and the parade dissembles. The carnie’s voice grows hoarse unto quiet—he has nothing to sell but a thrill that suffices like a blur of lights. After all. Wo sind meine wunderschönen Kinder?

After all, observe. Note. Inventory the many ways to cross the green felt. The dime laid upon the cushion head, the game continues. As long as there is a match to set aflame, inevitable ember, ash adrift. The smoke I can or snuff.

True is permission:

Let the parades pass noisily and celebrate the recession. Come parade, go.

Let desperate people revel. Come desperation, go.

Let children dive like little hawks upon sweet rodents. Come children, go hawks. Come sweetness, go.

Let all participants prepare.

Let my parents prepare. All my people prepare. Let them find their faces.

Ease is just a matter of time, after all.

Something I might say, will say, after all. Say, even if no one hears. It is right.

After all. This my work.

· The Street Cleaner ·

December 2009. Let me be tidy and make a clean sweep of it, and quickly, too.

The winter rains come. The sky’s haze informs of it, the deepening blue West, a mood and anticipation. The ache in ribs I broke when I was a young man is the tangible strain of air. All the squashes we make of our lives, all that is unresolved will dissolve into absences. There’s a rumble in the air; electric lines thrum like bass guitars. A concert of birds whirl like leaves and leave my arc.

I live in Nacogdoches, Texas, have lived here little more than a year. I have lived here and, before here, in many places: in Idaho and Nebraska, in Texas and Oklahoma, in Nebraska and Missouri and in Nebraska at the beginning of it all. Many prepositions knot a thirty-year Odyssey:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end.

My wife and I discuss settling down—here in. That we will live our last years in Piney Woods; in the country where, by night, coyotes serenade star-freckled darkness and owls stake claims along perimeters; where nightly the armadillo digs up lawn, grubbing. So often the human universe has unformed itself, all things natural and contrary work to redefine what form is: cattle egrets flying in triangles to the pond across the county road, ants in the pasture building domes, the cylinders of organ-pipe wasps. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Thirty years running,

Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free, onward impulse brushing through.

We discuss: settling down. Where the gypsy’s ashes may be scattered. I would not mind the noise of coyotes or owls, nor the insistences of cattle at the pond. But cast me, I say, where the armadillo cannot nose me. If red earth is home I go to, let him stay out of my home.

But where is home? I do not remember when I was home last. Yet my homecoming is constant, my music to commemorate it odd with counterpoint and improvisation, click and clack and euphonious clang. The broken old men of the Creighton Pool Hall, having played down trump or suit, may have said it brokenly: Ich kann mich nicht daran erinnern, wann ich zuletzt in meiner Heimat war. If Creighton is home, as if the port the barge launched from, last was after my father’s death brought me to the cemetery’s arc and before my uncle’s, whose funeral I did not attend, year I do not recall. I wrote a poem in eulogy, faxed it to a preacher my uncle never knew, and let words suffice as they might against absence. I wrote how he taught me to run a pool table’s cushion, to command the cue and play English. I am told cousins found tears to shed among the words, but the poem, poor and ineffectual, like so much said when one is dead, was a lie. He was an impatient teacher who showed me once and, when I would not lesson immediately, went off his way, to the hurrah among friends spinning dirty jokes. I committed the poem to a file drawer. It is right. I take my forgetting and take it slow. I wrote nothing for my father’s occasion; he had succeeded. At last. At something. The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious. The voices of his failures haunt me, still, shadows of blackbirds that cross overhead; there they are, always: on white walls across from windows barbaric with light; outside of doors where wind knocks; in the garden, as I kneel in dirt, my hands planted among the bulbs I plant.

Thirty years the patterns have run, have brought me to expectations of ash and woods and space and abounding settle, like cadences of drums quit. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

Thirty years to get here. Forty years from home to home, Creighton to the East Main Street of Nacogdoches, Texas, closed now for the Nine Flags Festival Parade. Nine flags to celebrate occupation, revolution, settlement, and occupation again. Main Street, where old stores sit empty or sit full of empty antiques. Is this true of all Main Streets?

I sit at a stoplight triggered to alternate red from all sides and stare ahead. Traffic cops direct drivers toward downtown parking or detours north or south to bypass. The cops wave their arms impatiently at me, to make up my mind though my mind was set before I arrived at this corner. I swing left and circle back to the Loop and bypass the bypass. Main Street and the cavalcade may have new things for me, but I have been to parades enough. I persist and prefer: order and signify the new in old ghosts and smoky windows, the diaphanous. I fear those big words which make us so unhappy. Let me be tidy:

Too many pangs, leaves tumbling down the street and about the feet of marchers. Too many birds on light lines crying and sputtering,

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d,

and it is not that I have no feeling for birds and cyclical commitments. I have flown here as they have, the veterans of family locked in earth in forgetful snow. My wife and I discuss ash and dust. We have planted dawn redwood for our repository, an age and height to which we may grow. Our document.

Until that morning
Honey, nothing's going to harm you now
No, no, no no, no no, no, no, no, no, no
No, no, no no, no no, no, no, no, no, no
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't you cry

The street cleaner and its circular brush beats jub, jub, jub. Swoon of shame. It is right.

Still, a great gathering is gathering, still and great.