The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Jim McGarrah
Illusion, U.S.A.
Like Kudzu, a history thrives in tiny rural towns unaware of its desire to control an ecology it doesn’t understand. A tourist in one of these towns sees chifforobes, antique chairs, newly varnished furniture, and gilded busts of local heroes fresh from important estate sales crowding the sidewalks on a street strategically called Main. Shops full of chocolate and old-fashioned soda fountains outline the town square. In this 21st century, a farmers’ market offers healthy changes to your diet and a store stacked with used books make you think decent country folk still read. On one of a few special days each year, the artsy-craftsy housewives set up tents on the courthouse lawn and offer homemade jams, homespun quilts, and homegrown oddities that defy definition. There is no urban sprawl in this pastoral scene unless you count two convenience stores that sell gasoline and grape slurpees, one McDonald’s or a Pilot truck stop just off the interstate exit a mile west of the last Baptist church. What you won’t notice is the misery of nostalgia.
A locomotive thunders by twice a day with empty freight cars crisscrossing Main, its soot and stench form a cloud of shadows that used to hold a bank, a union hall, two schools, a library, a family doctor, and a single room post office in paradise. An Occasional Poem for No Occasion
Honeysuckle rises through a spring perfume of gasoline from a neighbor’s leaky lawnmower and onions boiling with garlic in the Nigerian stew next door. It’s a typical May day. The sun shines. Two deer graze near the woods across Highway 29. My dog trees a squirrel. Somewhere someone is dying. At 9AM my daughter bought a new car. My son drove his old one to work. A slight ripple of wind ruffles the sea of dandelions near Walmart and a siren screams in the distance. Why is the world working so hard to implode? In a copse of pine trees near a parking lot crows glisten as they glean the ground around a single metal trash bin adding mystery to the theme of urban isolation that would make Edward Hopper proud. No one can define love anymore. We have dulled the senses that create the word. But there is no evil in my heart this morning, and I’m as close to being born after being born as anyone gets. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |