Poetry by Ron Self from Rich Man's Son
New Adam
In the mist of early morning
the driver of the car in front of me
is only a silhouette: head, neck,
pair of broad shoulders;
and from these I must fashion
a body entire, Frankenstein-Adonis
extrapolated from the limited view,
the parts and pieces I can see,
can shovel up from the graveyard
of past encounters, summon
from the morgue of memory;
and as we drive along,
he in his car up front,
me in mine behind,
I cobble and stitch him together,
cut, paste, snip and sew,
connect the dots of head, neck,
broad shoulders to rag-tag abattoir
of torso, limbs, essential appendages,
create new Adam from assorted
random atoms, blow breath into him,
extend a finger of my hand to his,
endow him with the life
I imagine for myself;
and with that he speeds up,
exits Eden heading east,
hell-bent at the dawn of creation.
Waiting Quiescent
I am not yet there,
but some part of some thing
that will one day become me
is in that interior ocean
waiting quiescent
for some part of some other thing
to swim in from the sea,
fight upstream over the falls,
roil its way through the rapids,
across the narrowing shallows
toward me, toward that part
of some thing that will one day
become me. And Gaia,
my mother, the Earth
that contains the ocean
that contains me, waits, too,
but not quiescent, not passive,
moving with the pendulum
of back and forth, of out and in;
the variable rhythm of time and tide
that waits for no man, for no woman;
the essential urge, inevitable compulsion
that causes the something
that will one day become me
to coalesce into something
that somehow suddenly is
genesis, my beginning,
me.
Ancient Voice
In the picture,
the little boy in diaper,
rubber pants and T-shirt,
leans away from
but still holds on tight
to the fence, unwilling
to trust himself, unwilling
to let go, start walking.
That he is cared for,
that he is loved,
is in his face,
is in his eyes
looking off camera
toward someone, someone
who beckons him forward:
“Come on, you can do it.
Come on, you can do it.”
If you listen, maybe
you can hear that voice,
perhaps hear the ancient voice
in your own head,
in your own picture:
“Come to Daddy. Come to Daddy.
You can do it.”
Single Scoop Moon
The half-moon hangs
in the early morning sky
like a single scoop of ice cream,
vanilla, pressed into an invisible
sugar cone pointed down
and to the left, falling toward earth
exactly like the soft-serve mountain
his mother bought him
one hot summer day
at the Dairy Queen
in Hattiesburg, Mississippi,
a fifteen-cent cone
back when you could still buy
a nickel cone or a dime cone,
and fifteen cents bought
a whole lot of ice cream;
and as he walked away from the window,
turned to cross the parking lot,
before even a single happy lick,
the ice cream shifted, began to slide,
avalanching downward, to the left,
falling toward earth
and the blacktop pavement,
where it landed with a plop,
spread out in a snowball cloud
of failed expectation,
melting disappointment;
and back when fifteen cents
bought a whole lot of ice cream,
when he felt like crying, he cried,
and he felt like it then, and did,
until his mother bought him another cone,
a nickel one this time, single scoop,
pressed down into sugar cone,
vanilla half-moon yearning
forever.
Six of One
They carried the old man
in a bed sheet doubled over,
held tight in the corners
by four stout men,
and when they got to our house,
they laid him across the porch swing,
called for Doctor Hendrick, who came,
black bag in hand, a few minutes later,
listened with stethoscope to the old man’s chest,
pronounced him dead from a heart attack.
All the while his house
was in flames, burning to the ground,
and five-year-old me,
on tiptoe in flannel pajamas,
was having a hard time
deciding which I’d rather watch:
the fire across the street,
or the dead man on the front porch.
Wash Away My Sin
I don’t remember now
what it was I said
that caused my grandmother,
a kind, gentle, grandmotherly soul,
to snatch me up by the arm,
drag my little boy body
kicking and screaming
into the bathroom
where she proceeded to wash
my mouth out with Ivory soap,
a Crisco-white bar
“so pure it floats,”
forced through my lips,
across my clenched teeth,
into my “dirty, foul mouth”
to wash away every semblance
and trace of whatever word,
gosh, golly, darn or damn,
it was I had said.
I don’t remember now
what it was I said,
but I do remember,
and will never forget,
what that goddamn
soap tasted like.
Fly Me to the Moon
Jules Verne took the boy
on his first journey
from the Earth to the moon
in a Classics Illustrated comic book
bought for twenty-five cents
off the rack at the back
of Foster’s Drug Store,
Main Street, Podunk, U.S.A.,
about as far as you could get
from the moon in those days
and still be on the planet Earth.
Back then all the boy knew
about the moon
was that it was a boon
to budding poets
because it rhymed with spoon and June
and had something to do with love
and silver light from up above.
He knew less about love
than he did about the moon,
and there was no book
on the rack for that,
no Jules Verne to tell the story,
show the way,
illustrate in pulp fiction
comic book color,
how to love,
how to allow himself to be loved,
how to fly to the moon
and, like Neal Armstrong,
come home again.
He had to learn
that lesson for himself,
like we all do,
or maybe like some of us
don’t.