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Sad news for anyone who's ever been to the North Main bars--Dillon's will close tonight, and soon the city and flood mitigation folks will own the property and tear it all down. I'll be posting photos from there, and below are a couple poems that center on my times there. This first one got started in Dillon's as I listened to a game of pool and some friends talking. I learned a lot and had a lot of amazingly wonderful, in every sense of the world, adventures there.
THE VERY INTENTIONAL THIEF
Muffled sounds of juke box, live band down the way, drift around on the sidewalk. A girl slips in the door of a small dive bar, doesn’t pause, moves to the dim clack of pool shots under the constant din.
Back where she’s from it’s maple sugar time. The sap rises even as crusted snow sits stubborn at the edges of roads and parking lots.
Clear liquid drips into covered buckets, the taste a faint ghost of sweetness, a green rawness at the back of her tongue.
Her father would drive to small towns with tapped trees. On the square hourly men and women stirred, recited how much boiling sap had to distill down to a gallon of syrup, how much more work to the candy she could only nibble at hungrily.
Hanging close to her father’s elbows, she waited for casual stories of his own sugaring days on farms where most still kept a team of horses.
She had to listen close as they wandered the crowds, learn to distill his words from the others.
Her lesson? Anything told in that off-handed way grows to its own beauty, can be carried away under the tongue.
Which goes a long way to here, to a girl who leans in at the bar, sips a drink with melted ice, the taste a sweet wateriness.
She listens to people she loves, curls around the words, smuggles them out under the lights of last call, for safe keeping tucks them into her sleeves, into her own hands and mouth.
for everyone at Dillon’s
Dana, who this poem is dedicated to, is one of those people that, after they've vanished from my life, I think, 'what was that all about?' Who knows. But again, it was what I guess I needed at that point in my life. My own visit to the underworld masquerading as Dillon's.
THE STORY YOU TELL ME TONIGHT
Tangles up in handfuls of downers, a 9th floor roof. You sat at the edge, leaned out to catch the fishhooks tossed by space aliens next door eager to reel you in, a girl in tears behind you, afraid you wanted to fall all those nine stories.
Younger then, you lived in California, a place I’ve never totally trusted. Now you’re older here in Ohio drinking at a small bar.
To the uninitiated I could be the real thing, could be your girl, the one who cooks, feeds the cat after you leave for work, then locks the door, goes down the stairs still happy from the night before.
But that’s not anywhere near the truth.
You keep us all just that far from you, that same distance I imagine the girl on the roof kept from you, afraid to take one step closer, that footfall enough to let you slip off the edge, vanish from her hands forever.
Lights up, the bar now about empty, I walk to the door, don’t look back over my shoulder, fairly sure you still follow at arm’s length.
There’s nothing I can do to change what you discovered back then— our fates either doomed by the choices of others, or, left on our own, we just might make it out alive and alone.
for Dana
From a favorite photograph of my father when he was in his 70's.
LOVE LETTER TO WHERE I COME FROM
for my father
The cicada’s song weighs down the blue haze that slides over the river, heat and humidity not lifted for days.
The trill and vibrato holds the world still, stops any thoughts except how summer has started to slide down the slope to fall.
Somewhere a man in his 70’s leans against a garage, notes this beginning shift to another season, delights in the hard sudden sound
like a man with an unending supply of surprise parties ahead of him.
This poem was one of the first I wrote after moving in to the JonesBuilding. Chris, who stars in this, and who's also one of two people the book is dedicated to, is a wonderful artist and brillant person. And the kindest person--when I moved to Findlay and met him, he helped me get involved with the local art scene and all the people there, and we had many lovely crazy adventures. Without him, I know the book would never have existed.
ILLUSIONS OF EDEN exhibit, Columbus Museum of Art
Chris and I move in independent
thought through landscapes of the Midwest, the soft hopefulness of the 1930’s and ‘40’s oddly sweet, nostalgic, fields puffed, curved like bread rising in a bowl. Even in portraits the subjects hold out for hope, for prosperity or love to resurface, carry them forward. No going back now. At the edge of my sight, Chris leans, examines brushstrokes of a landscape, peers over the top of his reading glasses. I want to walk over, drop to my knees, propose marriage. But then common sense returns and I don’t. Where exactly lies illusion? What exactly is Eden? Don’t kid yourself. If the perfect existed, if we could go there and stay, would we tumble in? Let the gates go shut, leave wrecked cars, emptied bank accounts, unfixable scars, unrequitable love, behind us? Cynicism’s not the worst character trait to possess. There’s greed, envy, sloth, for starters. Cynicism at least allows for reality yet appreciates illusion. Outside the museum, the sky azure and simple, the quirky March heat shines perfect. Think about it. To paint an illusion so precise, so limitless in ebullience that, when you set down the brush, for a moment you almost believe. It’s all there, just outside some door. But you know not to open it. --for Chris K
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