[lit-ideas] SUNDAY POEM. A long, but easy read.
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2007 16:20:32 -0600
RIVER RUMINATIONS
I'm walking along the lower bluff,
it's lovely here, a sunny, snappy day.
A football field's length to the east
there's a higher bluff,
that's where rich people get to prove
just how goddamn rich they are.
One of those mansions belongs to Cybill Shepherd,
I always look to see if she's
standing on her verandah
watching the common folk play,
wishing she could be so carefree as we.
But she's never there. In fact,
I've never seen one of those rich SOBs in the flesh,
only their three story houses of gleaming glass
testify to their existence.
Cybill's house is supposed to be avant-garde, I guess.
Looks more like avant-pretentious to me,
but I don't begrudge her any of it, she's a local yokel,
born and bred here.
And she's my age, Cybill is
(well, sixteen days younger)
we would have been in the same class
had we attended the same school,
but Catholics frowned on co-ed then.
She went to Sacred Heart High School,
I went to Catholic High.
Both were schools for working-class kids,
and less than a mile apart.
How come I never met her, I wonder.
I dated several Sacred Heart School girls,
was even in some Sacred Heart School plays.
but I didn't even know she existed then,
never heard of her until The Last Picture Show.
Too late then. No way to catch her attention.
Just think, I could today be a kept man
had I but had the knowledge and the plan.
Twenty feet below me
Old Man River rolls along
looking for all the world
like a mile wide sheet
of oxidized aluminum.
Something there is about dull, dirty aluminum
that takes all poetry right out of my mouth.
Styx comes to mind. But I can't decide
if Memphis is the life side or if it's over there:
in the flats of Arkansas.
Neither side offers much evidence either way.
Before they built the levees
the river would flood thirty miles into Arkansas
every spring, bringing all the lovely topsoil from
almost every state east of the Rockies
and lay it at our feet. Those lucky old slaves.
But I'm not in a preaching mood today.
I'm walking the mile an a half length of Tom Lee Park.
Tom Lee, a black men, saved 32 white people from
the clutches of Old Man River in 1925
when a steamer capsized just south of Memphis.
He saved them with his row boat.
Twenty-seven years later the city leaders
decided to make a park of a section of bank
unsuited to any profitable use and called it Tom Lee Park,
even erecterd an obelisk in honor of
the man who the city leaders in 1952
felt bold enough to call:
"A Very Worthy Negro."
I guess that's a step up from the city leaders
of 1925 who rewarded him
with a job as a garbage collector.
But I'm not in a preaching mood today.
His story belongs to history,
and that history is his story.
I have my own history. My own story.
I used to come here even before this was Tom Lee park.
I can remember it though I was probably only four or five.
My father would bring my brother and me down here
and we would walk along the bluff
marveling at the river and the birds and the barges,
and were fascinated by the people fishing along the bank,
black people mostly, how they called to one another
and joked and laughed -- such wonderful entertainment.
We envied them, my brother and I, not knowing
this was out of desperation, not play.
Many years later I came to realize
just how many people envied them,
people old enough to know it was all deadky serious
but whose own histories had trapped them in respectable careers
from which there was no escape.
Mike Geary
Memphis
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