The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Mon 4/24/06)

Coming and Going

Whatever we get out of this,
It's not enough. Once,
I could rattle a flat highway
To somewhere else, on the front seat
A jug of monkey rum
And miles behind me a woman
With her heart blown out, soaking
The motel bed in moans,
As the moonlight fell
Face down in the parking lot.

After the wrong turns
That heaved us here, as far
From heaven as from hell,
We brood over the blame:
The unforgiving shifts of weather; a blur
Where the plot lines rise
Out of smalltalk into crisis;
Havoc in the maps. Looking for
The only road left open, the course
Of least grief, we try
To take it all back,
Like wheels sidewinding deep
In mire and loose gravel,
In the slack panic of regret.

But the way I feel tonight,
Neither misery nor mercy
Can steer me through the mudmaze
Or heal my needs. And already
It's too late for anger,
The kind that patches up
The wound it's opened, poultice
At the pressure point; too late
For apologies, the rearview retrieval
Of colliding lives. I want to
Put the pedal down again and leave
Blue smears and smoke
When I drive these shaken dreams away.

Elton Glaser

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Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and former director of The University of Akron Press, where he now edits the Akron Series in Poetry. Nearly five hundred of his poems and translations have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies such as Poetry, The Georgia Review, and The Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry. He has published five full-length collections of poems: Relics (Wesleyan University Press, 1984), Tropical Depressions (University of Iowa Press, 1988), Color Photographs of the Ruins (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), Winter Amnesties (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), and Pelican Tracks (Southern Illinois University Press). He coedited, with William Greenway, I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (University of Akron Press, 2002). Among his awards are two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, five fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Crab Orchard Award, and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. In 1996, he was presented the Ohioana Poetry Award in recognition of his contributions to poetry as a teacher, publisher, and poet. His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry, and in Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry.

********************

RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

Beautiful and painful.

:hi:

:hi:

RL

For some reason, unknown to myself, the poem sorta
reminded me of these song lyrics ...

Perhaps as 'a prelude to the poem'.

'S'
................

Chuck Berry - Maybellene


Maybellene

Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You've started back doing the things you used to do.

As I was motivatin' over the hill
I saw Maybellene in a coup de ville.
A Cadillac a-rollin' on the open road,
nothin' will outrun my V8 Ford.
The cadillac doin' 'bout ninety-five,
she's bumper to bumper rollin' side by side.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You've started back doing the things you used to do.

Pink in the mirror on top of the hill,
it's just like swallowin' up a medicine pill.
First thing I saw that Cadillac grille
doin' a hundred and ten gallopin' over that hill.
Offhill curve, a downhill stretch,
me and that Cadillac neck by neck.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You've started back doing the things you used to do.

The Cadillac pulled up ahead of the Ford,
the Ford got hot and wouldn't do no more.
It then got cloudy and it started to rain,
I tooted my horn for a passin' lead
the rain water blowin' all under my hood,
I knew that was doin' my motor good.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?
You've started back doing the things you used to do.

The motor cooled down, the heat went down
and that's when I heard that highway sound.
The Cadillac a-sittin' like a ton of lead
a hundred and ten a half a mile ahead.
The Cadillac lookin' like it's sittin' still
and I caught Maybellene at the top of the hill.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?
Oh Maybellene, why can't you be true?

You've started back doing the things you used to do.

:hi:

I haven't heard that song in ages.

and welcome to DU!

:hi:

I post a thread like this every day, hope to see you out here.

Look at my journal for all the previous posts.

RL

how's it?

you?

RL

sameness is practically an absolute in my life -- cause of my dad.

:hug:

RL

:kick:

RL