Slant Six. Erin Belieu
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Nebraska, stuffing our Sunday
shoes full of straw so that either Jesus
or the Easter Bunny could leave us small,
bullet-shaped candies in honor of what, I was
never quite sure. Where do such customs
come from? Everywhere!
Americanness is everywhere,
wedged into everything, is best when driving
around a frowsy Gulf Coast city with its terrific
mini-marts like Bill’s, the very best of all marts!
UN of toasted boat rats and boys from the projects
revving their hoopties; of biscuit-shaped ladies who
penny their scratch cards and hold up the line;
where Panama (from Panama) commands
the counter, and Mr. Bud, the camel-faced man,
offers every kid a sweetie, producing a jar
of petrified lollies from a shelf also
displaying an array of swirly glassed pipes
and Arthurian bongs, where Raul the Enforcer
idles at the back, packing since the incident
in the parking lot last summer.
Of course, people
here have their discontents: the artists save
what tips they don’t snort and always mean
to leave for New York or Seattle, though I tell
them both drizzle like November half the time.
So I say, No! That’s un-American. We need
our artists everywhere, not scrunched up
in one or two rarefied spots,
which makes their parties anxious. And Miłosz
says artists come from everywhere, from everyplace,
the capital and the provinces, to keep
the body healthy or else end up like 17th-
century Hapsburgs or German shepherds
listing with hip dysplasia. So I’m circling
the swampy taint of this Southern city, choosing
art, choosing to be American, actively pursuing
that fabled happiness when the alternatives
present themselves, which is my obligation,
both legislator and witness to Bill’s
Mini-Mart and Mike’s Chinese Grocery,
and the hungry citizens queuing up
in front of Jenny’s Lunchbox, waiting
on line for a pile of cheese grits to start
this day, placing them firmly for the moment
in the happiness column. Because what’s more
American than a full stomach on a sunny morning?
What more than this fat-assed acceleration,
driving with the windows cranked down?
LOVE IS NOT AN EMERGENCY
More like weather, that is,
ubiquitous, true
or false spring—the ambivalence
we have
for any picnic—
flies ass-up in the Jell-O,
the soft bulge of thunderheads.
Right now, the man in the booth
next to me
at the Nautilus Diner,
Madison, New Jersey,
is crying, but looks up
to order their famous disco fries.
So the world’s saddest thing shakes you
like a Magic 8 Ball;
and before him, the minstrel
who smeared on love’s blackface, rattling
his damage like a tambourine.
I have been the deadest nag
limping circles round
the paddock, have flown to beady pieces,
sick as the tongue of mercury
at the thermometer’s tip.
But let’s admit there’s a pleasure, too,
in living as we do,
like three-strike felons who smile
for the security cameras,
like love’s first responders,
stuffing our kits with enhancement
pills, Zig-Zags, and Powerball cards.
I read: to greet is the cognate for
regret, to weep, but welcome
our weeping,
because we “grant the name of love
to something less than love,”
because we all have to eat.
THE BODY IS A BIG SAGACITY
is another thing Nietzsche said
that hits me as pretty specious,
while sitting in my car in the Costco
parking lot, listening to the Ballet
mécanique of metal buggies shrieking,
as each super, singular, and self-contained
wisdom of this Monday morning rumbles
its jumbo packs of toilet paper and Diet Coke
up the sidewalk. So count me a Despiser
of the Body, though I didn’t generate this
woe any more than the little man parked
next to me, now attempting the descent from
his giant truck, behemoth whose Hemi roars
like a melting reactor and stands
as the ego’s corrective to the base methods
by which the body lets the spirit down.
Buzz-clipped, tidy as an otter, he’s high and
tight in his riding heels. Pearl snaps on
the little man’s shirt throw tiny lasers
when he passes. But who isn’t more war
than peace? And how ridiculous to suffer
this: to be a little man, with itty hands
and bitty feet, to know yourself lethal, but
Krazy Glued for life to the most laughable
engine. Recycled, rewired, product of
genes and whatever our mamas thought
to smoke: the spirit gets no vote, Fred.
My body once was whole, symmetrical, was
actually