Summer 1966: After France & Remembering Bobby,
Who One Day Would Learn to Multiply and Divide,
Write Love Poems, Define Home, Fight Unfairly and
Live with as Much Gusto as a 7-Year Old. Perhaps.
From left coast to right, or the wide arc between,
which place claimed you? In New York you marveled
at the building’s backs scratched by clouds, and all your
pale cousins in Baltimore spoke strangely and couldn’t fathom
your nuclear family’s private lingo, while the drive to Texas
and its red ants and iced tea blossomed into adventures between
pages in the back seat of the VW bug. By the second week you
learned that Texans sweat as much as the French, and swear even
more, that you couldn’t fight one twin without taking on the other,
sometimes both at once. There was no question of fairness then,
just brotherhood, but the librarian would slip you the choicest
donated fiction, and you played baseball every day in the vacant lot
until sundown called the players home to black and white body
counts and cigarette commercials on the three channels received.
Sometimes you lay in bed under the half-light of the whirring
fan blades, and dreamt of heroes and ornithopters, zebras
and the scent of chocolate chip cookies in the oven. Other nights
you wondered how words could rest so calmly on one page yet
explode off the next, or why a man would climb a tower in Austin
to kill fourteen people when opportunities for mayhem and murder
burgeoned across the sea. Wasn’t living a matter of simple
subtraction? One by one the days parted and you walked through
that dwindling heat, eyes squinting, questions in hand, emerging
fifty years later having suffered additions and division and the
cruelties of love and success, honor and truth, still asking why
and how, home or house, where it went, your shoulders slumping
under the heft of those beautiful, terrible summers stacked high
like so many life-gatherings of unread books awaiting a bonfire.
This was first published in theSilver Birch Press “Moving” series, and an earlier version titled “Bonjour, Texas” appeared on the blog A Holistic Journey.
O at the Edges 
One of your best, Bob!
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Thanks, Lynne. Some of those days are still vivid, even now.
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“life-gatherings of unread books awaiting a bonfire”. It must be terrifying to be the poet that follows you at a reading, like being an amateur folk singer having to perform after The Who in the 1960s!
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Oh, if only that were so, though I must admit that my “Self-Portrait as Bowel Movement” might be difficult to follow…
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Nice slice of Texas culture/history …
Live with the gusto of a 7-year-old? I’d have to scrub away a LOT of life recall, and I’d need a younger body … a cool goal, though – go for it! Keep us posted on post-Texas acclimation.
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It’s a goal, but a difficult one to achieve. 🙂 As far as my post-Texas life goes, I’m happier than ever, and the colder weather hasn’t bothered me much. Due to work, I’m able to write only one or two poems a week, and can spend only a tiny fraction of time at blogging, but that’s not a bad thing. I’m still working into a new routine with the work schedule.
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Freedom to write can be enhanced by brevity … and other commitments always come with unexpected revelations, food for future writing …
My son (these days in Minnesota) tells me cold weather is no big deal, and you echo that. My Texas/Florida blinders need to come off!
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It’s all food for the writing!
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I felt like I was right there beside you. Do the French really sweat?
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Thanks, Mary Jo. They may not sweat, but they perspire! 🙂
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Something tells me that many of those thought still pass through your mind, from time to time.
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They flit through on occasion!
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