A Love of Lists
An homage to the comma.
Sweet Home Alabama
Sweet Home Alabama transformed that wedding hall into shot glass whiskey on long wooden bars, black plastic ashtrays, thick paper coasters with uncomfortable flags for the Confederacy, forgotten Dixie cups of Budweiser on amps, scuffed cowboy boots, and rattlesnake neckties. There were girls with red polka dot shirts tied off on their chests like the Dukes of Hazzard, and guys holding pool sticks straight up and down like pitchforks. There were backlit plastic waterfalls circulating in Rolling Rock signs, sticky red barstools, lip dangling cigarettes, amp burning cigarettes, cigarettes tucked into guitar strings near the tuning knobs. There were juke boxes you could kick to get free songs and pinky-finger guitar slides made from the necks of broken beer bottles.
Pandemic
I'm thinking of the lost early days here in New York City, long before the promise of vaccines, before that first season of sidewalk shelters and December heat lamps, before the white collar exodus from the city, and plummeting rents in Manhattan, before the NFL stadium seat cutouts, and the motorcycle rally in the Dakotas, and the doctors in front of Walter Reed, and the feverish President on the balcony. Before the pointless inertia of hand sanitizing and fruitless contact tracing, before the lumbering, bureaucratic WHO, the slumbering CDC, before the parade of forgotten Greek letters, the second-guessing, the bad blood, the knee-jerk acrimony. Before the long-COVID victims began to suffer their bad luck out-of-sight, each with a personal flavor of misery, depriving them of even the camaraderie of shared symptoms.
Last Things
My father’s bedside table was cluttered with plastic syringes and saline bottles. There was a medical device with a respiratory ping pong ball that hurt him to blow into, but whose toy-like quality, even in his cancer-ridden pain, amused him. There was Vaseline for his dry lips and crumpled tissues and modest turrets of pocket change that my father stacked by denomination. There was his bulky yellow Casio diver’s watch. There were old National Reviews. There was a plaster cast of his hand entwined with my brother’s that his sister had molded during her farewell visit. There were piles of cards from grieving friends trying to get something down before goodbye. There were New York Times book review sections haphazardly folded. Pairs of glasses. His things. Real things.
Mannish Boy
“The Sound” and the stop-time riff that follows have within them the complete DNA of rock and roll. The universe in a single measure. And every time I play it the same great doors of the same locomotive roundhouse rotate and open. There’s the same ground-trembling quake from the bass drum, the same fist-sized stones jumping up and down on the train tracks, the same bull hoofs crashing on the stable floor, the same horizon clouds crackling with heat lightning, the same roosters skidding across the roofs of tin shacks, the same moss-gurgling pools of testosterone bubbling up in the bayou, the same thrashing moonshine alligators, the same women stumbling through the burning corn, tearing their cotton dresses and chasing Waters’ unstoppable, slow-moving, black locomotive.
Requiem …03/26/2023;
I remember this one, because I never forgot the way you described her fall, a movie you scripted in your head, a preview, then in real time. I remember thinking, this is exactly how I would feel if I watched my husband literally head towards possible life changing disaster. Because it happens that way, doesn’t it. Your brilliant transition into the pandemic;
“Speeding up now, speeding up...
Goodbye and into the fire
Getting much harder now:
This, too. Fire.
Towards the end now.
Fire.
Three memories left, so two must go.
Fire.
Two left. One to go.
The hospital.”
This stands alone as a poem. Truthfully, I cannot find the right words, each and every paragraph is beautiful, painful, hits a nerve and stays, vibrating. Looking over your shoulder at the past. It is history after all, and we lived it. We were lucky. And I must find something to hold on to so it never becomes a faded, unrecognizable memory. You ‘whittled’ it down for me. I realize you may have written this for yourself, so you would not forget, but you also wrote it for me. I cannot think of a better way to say thank you for putting it to words, now, once again, I see it clearly. My one, if I had to choose;
“In a parking lot behind the hospital there are rows and rows of white refrigerator tractor trailer”. I will store this memory, label it ‘Stella Blue’.
reminded me -
Covid Gestalt
Here, where the room lives:
its walls lined with memories
and books; chairs changed by occupancies:
arms worn; legs chapped;
backs bent to the comfort of those moved on,
gone to live in other rooms,
gloom speaks to upholstery.
Misery talks back.
Here, where the room lives,
a freeze framed archived symmetry
now looks, sadly, over what has been,
and lost, and lacked.
Silently, cacophony calls back.
Voiceless, unsound memory
retraces life’s tracks.
Here, where the room lives,
unseated of company
I move from chair to chair
replaying the commentaries
of those who were once there
arguing their point of view,
moved by cushions shaped,
engraved, bequeathed speech,
and left to the bereft.
Cherry Coombe 2021