I want to begin with a poem which
is very untypical of Wright, in its casual talking,
as it's a prose poem.
But, many of his concerns are in the poem, his discomfort
with himself, with America, even with his own sentiments
to some degree.
It's called The Flying Eagles of Troop 62.
It is analogy of sorts to a man named Ralph Neal.
Ralph Neal was the scoutmaster.
He was still a young man.
He liked us.
I have no doubt he knew perfectly well
we were each of us masturbating unhappily
in secret caves and shores.
The soul of patience, he waited while we smirked
behind each other's backs, mocking and parodying the Scout
Law, trying to imitate the oratorical rotundities
of Winston Churchill in a Southern Ohio accent:
"Ay scout is trusswortha, loll, hailpful, frenly, curtchuss,
kand, abaydent, chairful, thrifta, dapraved, clane and
letcherass."
Ralph Neal knew all about the pain of the aching stones
in our twelve-year-old groins, the lava swollen halfway
between our peckers and our nuts that
were still green and sour as half-ripe apples
two months before the football season began.
Socrates loved his friend the traitor
Alcibiades for his beauty and for what he might become.
I think Ralph Neal loved us for our scrawniness, our acne,
our fear; but mostly for his knowledge
of what would probably become of us.
He was not a fool.
He knew he would never himself get out
of that slime hole of a river valley,
and maybe he didn't want to.
The Vedantas illustrate the most sublime of ethical ideals
by describing a saint who, having endured
through a thousand lives every half-assed mistake
and unendurable suffering possible to humanity from birth
to death, refused at the last minute
to enter Nivarna because he realized
that his scruffy dog, suppurating at the nostrils
and half mad with rabies, could not accompany him
into perfect peace.
Some of us wanted to get out, and some of us wanted
to and didn't.
The last I heard, Dickey Beck, a three-time loser
at housebreaking, was doing life at the State Pen in Columbus.
The last I heard, Dale Headley was
driving one of those milk trucks where
the driver has to stand up all day
and rattle his spine over the jagged street-bricks.
The last I heard from my brother-in-law, Hub Snodgrass,
he was still dragging himself home
every evening down by the river to shine, shower, shave,
and spend a good hour still trying
to scrape the Laughlin steel dust out of his pale skin.
He never tanned much, he just burned or stayed out
of the river.
The last I heard, Mike Kottelos was making book in Wheeling.
I've never gone back there down home to see Ralph Neal.
My portrait hangs on one of the walls of the Martins Ferry
Public Library.
Ralph Neal would think I've become something.
And no doubt I have, though I don't know just what.
Scribbling my name in books.
Christ have mercy on me alive; and after I'm dead,
as Pietro Aretino of Florence requested of the priest
after he had received extreme unction and his deathbed,
"Now that I've been oiled, keep me from the rats."
When I think of Ralph Neil's name,
I feel some kind of ice breaking open in me.
I feel a garfish escaping into a hill
spring where the crawdads burrow down
to the pure bottom and hot weather to get to the cool.
I feel a rush of long fondness for that good man Ralph
Neil, that good man who knew us dreadfully and utterly
vulnerable little bastards better than we knew ourselves,
who took care of us better than we took care of ourselves,
and who loved us, I reckon, because he knew damned
well what would become of most of us,
and it sure did, and he knew it, and he loved us anyway.
The very name of America often makes me sick,
and yet Ralph Neal was an American.
This country is enough to drive you crazy.