Portrait of the Artist as a Nice Guy

In the backyard the crocuses

hear the green knock to begin,

& begin. Another March

& still in Cincinnati, you stand

at the window in your yellow bathrobe

watching the squirrels go about their rounds

like the zealous housewives of Montfort Heights.

And beyond them, past the backyards

& the river, past everything

you thought you wanted, Kentucky

holds out its arms for you.

In an hour

you'll be dressed & at work: teaching

the children of Mr. & Mrs. Southern Ohio

the fine points of a life given over

wholly to sensibility . . . . But after class

there's the inevitable Committee work,

the tweedy pipe-puffing boys

moaning about work-loads & Literature

for the Social Good. And you'll sit there

wanting to pound your head on the table,

but nod thoughtfully instead, say something

vague & solicitous to one faction

or the other, all the while dreaming

of Kentucky-how a month will resolve

its meager consolations into forsythia, to dogwood

creaming the hills. Anyway, it's no crime

to be pleasant, even to jerks. Sure, you say,

sure-I'm their number-one nice guy.

But the world is full of nice guys

& all of them write poetry.

And for what?

Afternoons at the desk in your study,

dutiful as a schoolboy, cranking it out:

30 lines of second-rate surrealism a day

from the available horseshit of the senses.

And though friends talk of this one

or that one handling success or failure,

the real crunch, you know, is mediocrity-

to take your ambition in your arms

& hold it there, sheltering it

from a world that would ask more of you

than you are.

Years ago, ambitions seemed

smaller, more benign-like wanting to walk

the woods from Greenup County to the Cumberland

Line. And there were women in the trees

calling you . . . Remember?

The chocolate in their voices.

How you would have emptied

your arms, risked anything for them.

How you could hear, even in the woods,

the low moan of the trucks on Interstate 70

crushing the bones of Tecumseh & the rubble

of a thousand luckless Shawnee warriors.

And that time in the mall, at closing,

when you saw the worn-out ghost of Eugene Debs

shuffling among the darkening stores, muttering

that Cincinnati was the only afterlife

he was entitled to.

Gone. All of it.

The heady, Cracker Jack socialism, the whole

small press two-chapbooks-a-year routine.

Forget it, kiddo. You're up for tenure:

sitting on the edge of the bed with a shoe

in your hand, watching your daughter

rattle the bars of her crib. Let me out!,

she cries. And then, forgetting what she wanted,

she picks up her bottle & guzzles it down.

You put on your shoe. And for a moment

you imagine holding her, just holding her.

So close you could tell her anything-

that sometimes even the emptiness

seems human & misunderstood,

or that one day you'll vanish

as easily as a smear of sunlight

on the lawn & no one will know, tell her

that there, in her pink plastic baby-bottle

is the sweetness of life . . .

But you don't.

You walk to the window, instead,

stare out at the hills floating in fog.

Milk, you say. That's all she's drinking.

That's all it needs to be. Milk

from the placid, Republican cows

of Ohio.

ELEGY

At the door of your room

you leave everything.

The hallway is filling with snow.

At first, it seemed so close

to the other side of the hall,

the door to Mother's room.

But now, halfway there & halfway

to go, the snow settling behind you

has filled in your footprints, .

& there's nothing there to show her

how hard you've worked to get here,

how hard you must work just to stay.

And when you finally reach her door,

when you knock, when you ask:

Mother, may I come in?

Soon, she says. Soon.

As soon as you've been good.

Structure

104 lines · 5 stanzas