USA

taylorb@uwec.edu

Our Back Yards

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The morning after the funeral 
Doris carries her grand-daughter 
through the garden that has joined 
the two houses for more than forty years. 

She coos as she walks the child 
in and out of the shade, 
"These are my mother's 
hibiscus, her hyacinth, hydrangea. 

This is the chair." She sits
and I hear how her mother 
used to sit with her and hold her 
and sing, but Doris doesn't.

#

I sit on my own back stairs, 
new again to this kind of living,
new it seems to me once more 
to everything, and wait 

for my own mother to die
some thousand miles away,
my own baby daughter held
for this moment beside me

my boy, five, playing
with trucks in the dust
at my feet, looks up
and asks, 

"How sad will you be 
when your momma dies?"
"Show me," he says,
"show me with your hands?"
WAYY's on her kitchen radio
and her kitchen window's open.
September is "Nostalgia Month"
and sometimes we're almost ashamed 
at how little it takes to make us happy.

THE PARENTS: THE PHOTO

They are together there and 
thought they always would be,
you can see it in his eyes.
He's cool in white bucks and 
a sky blue windbreaker slung 
over his shoulder lounging 
outside of Somerville High.

Class on the high-hat and 
barely 4-F he could polish off
and old soft shoe smoother
than any out of work hoofer
could tap an idle toe to,
the better joints still 
echo his restless solos. 

Buttery fleshed 
rare ration of joy,
in war scared Boston
every liberty was hers
when all the adolescent soldiers
and all the sailor boys sailed off
to beat the Fascists back.


Coy acrobat but hip enough 
to tease, she didn't go 
all the way but went 
pretty far and thought 
she'd done OK for a girl. 
Unaware the Russians
entered Warsaw, he told her 
he'd call her again and did

a chesty little redhead
in a flashy cotton print that 
shows a lot of leg for '45,'
tiptoed on five-inch spikes
and wearing a ten inch bow
that couldn't even then 
have ever been that blue. 

THE YEAR THE CROONER DIED

It was the year men stopped 
shining their shoes, guys who had 
the world on a string, it was the summer 
the string broke.

Le Corbusier completes his Chapel 
of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp
while in 30,000 motels all across America 
stunned flies die agonized dreamy 
and demented on the window sills.

And gals and dolls and chicks in
brassieres pale blue and bulletproof,
in exotic fur and zircon chokers swooned 
to nothing else all night on the radio
as if they had ever much before.

The S.S. Andrea Doria goes down in a heavy fog 
60 miles off Nantucket. Jackson Pollock 
is run down on Long Island.
Polish workers riot at Poznan. 
Gas is 294 a gallon. Broadway went one way

There were a hundred words for guys
who were crooked, stupid, cheap.
Everybody knew a moke, a dope
or a punk as soon as he showed up
but there was only one word for him.

"Cool," of course, comes to mind,
not the smart ass way they say it today,
not flip and slickly ironic, but the way
everybody who knew what it meant
used to say it then, "Cool." 

And not any of the dozen ways 
we learned to say it later, 
beat, broken, black-listed 
and Buddha-ed out,
not even the way the brothers 

sassed, saxed and slapped it,
hopelessly hip, high and jive
or how some had to say it later,
hushed and out of harm's way , 
a chill warning to be still,


or irreproducibley, in the 60's, 
unless you're on acid at the time
and one C minus away from Vietnam,
all intake of breath and a giving out, 
up off and over to everything,

but slow, and low, like slipping into 
something silky brown and smokey, 
like breathing in to breathe out,
like believing "Cool," was something 
someone could still get away with being.

The year they razed the 3'rd Avenue El
the year coke became Coke
the year they introduced Crest and Special K
the year it was an all New York Series
and the Bums finally won.

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