Celebrate Poem In Your Pocket Day

    April 14th, is Poem In Your Pocket Day.

    Poems from pockets will be unfolded throughout the day with events in parks, libraries, schools, workplaces, and bookstores.  Find a list of events celebrating National Poetry Month at www.poets.org.

    Looking for a poem to fold into your pocket? Write one of your own and post it here to share with SLR readers. Or, try this emotional piece by Kate Daniels, the 2011 Hanes Award recipient, who has seen all sides of life in the South.

The Figure Eight       

  

The swan’s path is a calm infinity in Boston Common’s

public pond.  In it, closing back on itself after every turn,

I see the fragile image of my younger brother

in the years before his marriage failed, the rented farmhouse

south of Richmond he shared with friends, laborers

like him at Dupont Chemical.  In the evenings,

their gray uniforms dark with sweat, their hair flattened into oily mats,

they squat together on the worn wood steps to smoke

a few joints and guzzle cheap beers, tossing the empties

towards the edge of the wood.  They ignore the shattering.

A few minutes of silence before the alcohol kicks in,

its spidery fingers scrambling gratefully in their guts.

And then they’re bitching themselves into a state of restlessness –

they’ve finished with the niggers and the god damned democratic

president, dispensed with the northerners’ spiel

on collective bargaining.  They’re onto women now –

what cunts they are, how all they want is to take you

for a ride.  Pissed at the child support somebody’s

paying, the abortion another one’s wife refused to have.

And without even speaking, they rise and walk down

into the meadow, their cigarettes gleaming weakly in last light,

to the place where the old car rests, a junker someone finagled

for $85 and a lid of hash.  An Oldsmobile or something that

glamorous, from the 1950s,  once turquoise and sleekly desirable,

Elvis blaring from the perforated speakers in either door,

a shapely car hop leaning down to latch a silver tray of fries

and shakes on the rim of the driver’s  window…

One of them hotwires it alive and my brother slides in, grinning,

lit now, somebody at last, both hands gripping the wheel, and takes off

around the meadow as if – this time — he might really be going somewhere.

His buddies howl when the car stalls out in a deep rut

and then roars to life again, blue smoke breaking

through the back of the engine.  The car is whining and popping

with breakage, its back end swinging back and forth, the way

a wounded dog keeps going, homing for its master.  The wheels

are straining, like that, trying to moving forward,

but he’s just going around and around, around

in the mud stiff ruts, somewhere there in the dark cab,

his head cloudy, his mind set on nothing but the figure eight

he’s making in the mud, inscribing it deep in the earth

so when God looks down He’ll see the sign for infinity,

the same shape of the neat path the swan swims

in the pond at the public gardens where I sit, years away

several lives distant, a universe removed, my hands

shaking, my mouth dry, writing down the words of this poem.

 

 

     Editor’s Note: Kate Daniel’s original poem, The Figure Eight,  is published in her latest book, A Walk in Victoria’s Secret(LSU 2010). Due to fomatting restrictions, the original structure of the poem may be altered for some readers. If you view the poem with a few one-word lines, these are intended to be read with the line above them.