I’m in the booth of a Natchez restaurant
before dawn, having woken early
from a dream in which Stacy, with dark
shoulder-length hair, drove a compact red
mobile, and in a laundromat told my mother
and aunt Grace, two gray heads, I love her,
an Arkansan I met in Louisiana.
Last night at the motel here in Natchez
a Pakistani woman handed me a room key.
I wanted to ask about her life but held back.
With me, now, my cerebral storage room,
sometimes as large and dark as an aircraft
carrier’s compartment of five-gallon paint
pails, army-green with yellow stenciled
letters; other times as small and light as
a lilac box with stamps from Madagascar,
scapulars from Italy, a rabbit’s foot,
and a photo of my old self telling me
to hurry, time is running out. One night
you’re eating scungilli and calamari
in a restaurant in Palisades Park,
one morning you’re driving in the Smokies
listening to Sonny Til and the Orioles.
There’s a tree in the dust jacket of the novel
on the motel bed. One summer my father
bought my brother and me leather whips
in upstate New York. We’d been to a tent
show. The man who was its star
had been on television till he got cancer
of the larynx. After the show he told his
small daughter he’d shoot her dog
if she couldn’t keep it quiet. I remember
seeing him in a TV commercial swim
to a dock. A starlet draped a towel
around his shoulders and handed him
a coke. It was before color. They still
had Salem commercials with the young
couple arm-in-arm strolling though Eden
sunlight, shade, and shimmering grass.
I saw a landscape whose beauty
was of that magnitude three years ago
outside Pocahontas, Arkansas. One
booth over a kid’s sweatshirt says surfing,
a moment ago I thought it said suffering.
Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, The Homesick Mortician, is available from BlazeVOX books.
An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.