Al Young

CHOPS

for Stephen Henriques

Be it Havana, Savannah, Urbana, Atlanta-
restraint ain't never quite the same as paint;
you can really spread it around, or lay it on,
which isn't the same as the laying on of hands
or putting the rubber to the road, or calling
off your dogs. Calling off the beat comes close.
So in those homeless afternoons where winos
and crackheads turn up to nap on benches, and
in back alley doorways, under park bushes, or
inside the ebb tide of daytime nightmares-
frozen, gone limp-intention and meaning count.
More than false affection doled out at 5.6% APR
in an April that by June will jump back to hard times,
the way you show and tell how you feel and do speaks.
Like you, whoever hears it will chop what they need,
slice it thick or thin, and sand or leave it painted.
By then you'll be so cool, the sound of that touch
will make your trembling hands reach for a brush.

AN AMERICAN CHAMPION IN LOVE
for Lilly Benton

On borrowed time, she took another prize,
yet something held her back, breathed down her neck.
What slowed her breathing slept around her eyes,
their salty edges thickening where flecks

of reckless, juicy light rushed in. First-place
no longer met her need, her bigtime dream.
Dissolving, sliding, melted on her face,
even her dreams would scald her when they steamed

into their hot half-lives, and she could feel
their weight, her medals. Wild sweat clogged her nose.
What had her on the run, what made her heel
and toe the line now? Love: the way it rose

like afternoon-no night before, no dawn,
no morning sun, no warning light, no clue.
Was it OK to cry, all right to yawn?
No frame of reference, no Things To Do

list ate at her. No, nothing but a glimpse
of parted clouds remembered; skydive gear,
the rush a silly monkey's jump, a chimp's;
the moving ground a grin from ear to ear.

Fear suited up; love cut her gut some slack.
To run only to win seemed pointless, dumb-
like living on the mark. Get set! Attack!
Where had the old thrill gone? Now she felt numb;

she'd lost her heart, but how? No silver cup,
no bronze, no plaque, no cash, no ribbon went
with territory wired to trip her up
at every turn. Tricky. What had win meant?

Where had she spent her childhood-in a vault?
She loved to run; her parents loved to win.
She'd win a race and turn a somersault
- and Daddy, Mommy, both would clap and spin.

Her trainers told her: "Stop that! Act your age,
be dignified. Don't pull that kinda stuff"
So, sure enough, she studied the sports page,
TV news magazines, and even rough,

old, scratchy training films they showed at school:
the '36 Olympics in Berlin;
Ben Johnson's fall; why steroids were uncool-
that German girl they'd caught with doctored urine.

Routinely they watched re-runs of their meets
on videotape. What could they teach? Sometimes
her fantasies would beat their own retreats,
flickering with pissed-off Hitlers, busted rhymes

she'd hear and picture blasting while she raced.
When Wilma Rudolph cheered her from the stands,
she knew she couldn't lose; the meet was aced.
She'd dreamed of setting records, foreign lands,

Olympic sprinting, winning, triumph, cash.
Poor, sickly Wilma never told herself.
"A hundred-meter relay or a dash?
Two hundred? Hey, no way. I'm on the shelf

with this bad leg of mine. Just count me out."
So just as all her heroes had inspired
the way she outstepped shadows, undid doubt,
this runner always scored. She never tired,

never ran out of steam, or guts or balls,
whatever girls ran out of-ovaries?
A winner, yes, but not the kind who hauls
off, takes the cake, and splits. October sees

to that; her birthday month, a lucky time
of year. "I'm yours," October always told her.
"To crave my light has never been a crime."
A patriot she was; no athlete-soldier

dispatched to patch up social policies.
Democracy's a tyranny, she'd read
in Plato's The Republic; ancient Greece.
Their lit class gasped. 'What nerve! That's what he'd said.

We've got the greatest system in the world.
There never would've been a U.S.A.
if every king and queen and duke and earl
and emperor and tyrant had their way.

She'd fight for that, oh yes, she would defend
the land she loved, the only home she knew,
the same way Jesse Owens put an end
to Nazi big talk, proving who was who.

Her country? Love? Which would she sacrifice
when duty called, if push came down to shove?
The fix was in; she thought it rather nice
to let it hang, not have to choose--just love.

ANIMAL

That such an easing sound should make its moves
so smoothly on the tongue and in the flesh--
all padded paws, all cockatoos or hooves
--says something big about the ways we mesh.
Where once we granted soul its anima,
instinctively aware that raw volition
goes just so far (the same as stamina),
we worship bio-tech now; new religion.
The animal in ocean, jungle, stone--
we don't see with our eyes, but with our minds.
Intelligence, we think, is ours alone.
We smell, we groan, we pull our monkeyshines.
We speak and paint and dance and write and sing.
We snoop out landscapes where all bets are off,
where clothes stay packed and we, the King
and Queen of Soul, can do our stuff.
Maybe we love cartoons because they're us
except with anima put back in place.
These crazy ways we learn again to trust
the seal, the crocodile who wears our face.

WHO I AM IN TWILIGHT

Like John Lee Hooker, like Lightnin Hopkins,
like the blues himself, the trickster sonnet,
hoedown, the tango, the cante jondo,
like blessed spirituals and ragas custom-made,
like sagas, like stories, like slick, slow,
sly soliloquies sliding into dramas,
like Crime & Punishment, like death & birth,
Canal Street, New Orleans, like the easy,
erasable, troubled voices a whirling
ceiling fan makes in deep summer nights in
hot, unheavenly hotels -- Oklahoma, Arkansas,
Tennessee-like the Mississippi River
so deep and wide you couldn't get a letter
to the other side, like Grand Canyon,
like Yosemite National Park, like beans &
cornbread, like rest & recreation, like love
and like, I know we last. I know our bleeding stops.

BLUE COLLAR NIGHT

In the window of her room at Motel 6, the regional
McDonalds accounts officer checked me out, summed up
and balanced all her figures when she saw my absurd array:
the bags and loads and worlds I was juggling on my way up.
Or was I headed down? Stairs were no measure.
The way she stared told stories, told me, told the world
how shaky I had grown in this spring of poor mutts,
excuses, and road kill. At Best Western they were hosting
the California Highway Patrol convention. "Are you C.H.P?"
the pert and proper sister asked. "Do I look like C.H.P.?"
Not really up to waiting out her answer, I remembered April,
its reputation for cruelty. OK, that's cool. The rest of you months,
you're on your own. If "Tough Shit" Eliot meant
what he wrote about the waste, then wasting, now wasted land,
then what went down in history as poetry-in-motion----
meaning: poems-on-the-fly-means even I, no Prufrock,
not by a long shot -- may last through this sorry night.
Yes, last, my friend. Populism is almost the same as true religion.

©2000-2005 by Al Young