This one's a little more concrete.
It's one of the few poems I ever wrote about high school days
because my high school days were so miserable.
And basically maybe it'll help you out.
It's about an I. I suppose it's me in the poem who
goes to a high school dance.
You remember your first high school dance, how embarrassed
you were, and things just wouldn't work out,
and girls were dancing with the girls,
and the boys were sitting up in the bleachers?
No?
Well, any rate, that's the way it was at my first high school
dance.
Begins with a quote by Emerson which is,
"Wherever birds fly, they are flying home."
And I think that will--
the appropriateness of that will come through
by the end of the poem.
"The High School Dance."
The wise man said, "Wherever birds fly,
they are flying home."
In his own state we believe him, for here they are circling,
having kicked off their pumps in their stocking feet,
drugged women, arms around women.
I stand up in my bleachers watching them,
remembering the carnation truck that went off the mountain
curve last year above our farm to become
a constellation over the town.
Seeing the four kicked out, do I really see them?
Hose, one, nozzle, and dolly, previews of themselves,
drooling criminals.
One time around with a plumber's daughter, and that's enough.
I love her, but at arm's length, her eyes
are Olympic pools of water about to bubble out of control.
So out in the parking lot, I stew
alone drinking the home brew I made, yes, from orange peels,
talking to myself, but ever more aphasic,
my alfalfa hair ever more wild yearning
toward the stars going over.
And finally after they've all filed out,
and cursing Max has closed the place down,
that pile of stone with light shining through once
again returned to stone.
I start up the old rusting tractor, its cylinders popping,
jog all the way back standing up in the saddle
through the tunnels of the country roads.
Every once in a while through a field of shaking
the stars loose with my fist until up on a hillside,
I hear xenophobic rouser loose again,
barking, lost, miles away from home.