AN OLD POEM BRINGS A WELCOME SURPRISE

I came across an old poem of mine recently while trying to decide what books to give up and what to keep, and rather liked it, so I thought I would share it with you.  It’s rare enough to be this pleased with older work.  The most interesting thing to me was that when my beloved Jill heard it for the first time (as I read it to her) she remarked, “Not only is it a poem, but it’s also a short story.”  I was pleased to have my future direction as a writer of narrative fiction foreshadowed and confirmed.

I did make small changes from the text as published, but only back to the version I had originally sent to the magazine, which the editor, for reasons known only to him, had altered.

In any event, the poem was published in a Jamaican litmag (yes!  Jamaican!) called Now, back in 1973, and refers to a summer I spent in Mexico even earlier, in 1959, when I accompanied my then wife, an anthropologist, to her field work among a Russian community of “Spiritual Christians” in Mexico.  (She knew neither Russian nor Spanish; I could struggle along in both.)  The sect we lived among that summer, in our little Airstream housetrailer, was called the Molokans or, to give it its official title, Bratskii Soiuz Dukovnykh Khristian Molokan-Prigunov, which means “Brotherly Union of Spiritual Christians – Milk-drinkers and Jumpers.”  Don’t ask.

Though I can’t remember now what my errand was, I was obviously bound for somewhere deeper into Mexico than the small valley of Colonia Guadalupe in Baja California where the Russians lived, when the scene described in this poem took place.

A MEXICAN BUSRIDE

It is like an airplane.
It groans and drones,
It is very like an airplane.
Not like a modern plane
But a roaring, sputtering monster
From World War One
That used to dust the cotton fields
When I was a boy.

I remember how —
Terrifed,
Paralyzed,
But terribly drawn
To the hideous thrust of power
And the noise —
I would lie on my back
Among the cotton stalks
In the very row
On which the plane bore down.
I did not mind the poison fumes
That trailed beneath its pregnant belly.
I bathed in them,
Gasping, coughing,
Terrified,
And enjoying my secret terror.

Here in the Mexican bus,
Inherited from Greyhound,
Or wherever,
It is very like an airplane
From World War One —
Roaring, gasping, sputtering.
And recalling again
That special fear.

The driver seems not to notice it.
It is an art, not noticing.
He plays his part as classically
As Moliere would have him do
While the airplane-engined

Ancient Greyhound,
Or school-bus,
Or whatever,
Tries to climb
The twisted Mexican pass
From one desert to another.

Precisely at the point
Of beginning helplessness
Where the engine has begun
To demonstrate that it too
Is human
(or mechanical)
He begins to take off his shirt,
This stoic driver,
And never rests his wad of gum.

Both hands absent from the steering wheel,
Even as the motor bucks
And kicks
And protests —
Invited to more endurance
Than World War One technology
And many years of trial
Could justify —
Does the driver
Finish his disrobing.

Then,
At the last gasp
Of remembered power,
Of forgotten awesomeness,
The motor groans forgiveness
As, hands free at last,
The driver tries a lower gear.
The engine, the airplane
Responds with gratitude.

I look over the steep
Cliffside the wheels were crumbling
When the shift occurred.
The stones from the mountainside
Are still wheeling wildly
Into space,
As we almost were,
As perhaps
Some secret death wish
Or some hidden longing
To regain its wings
Made the engine want,
Briefly,
Also.

The driver listens
To the haunting roar,
Steers with one hand,
Casual,
And, like me in the cotton patch
I guess
— Half art, all artifice —
And enjoying the secret terror,
Never ceases to chew his gum.

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