This is a poem called "Arkansas Traveler," and is basically--
or it started out to be about my great-grandfather.
And then, like all my poems, it ended up about
and my grandmother, who I was very fond of,
who was his daughter.
My great-grandfather left Bohemia in 1856
to get out of the Austro-Hungarian War,
and ended up in Arkansas.
And four years later, got in another war
in 1860, as you can imagine.
And I think that's mostly--
then he ended up in a prison camp for a couple of years
and then went back to Little Rock.
There are some quotes from family letters,
which I feel compelled to go like this for, but I won't.
But I hope you can tell when the quotes come.
If you can't, tough luck.
I don't know.
I don't know what to say.
I can go like this, but I won't.
[LAUGHTER]
Why do I say these things?
"Arkansas Traveler."
On the far side of the water, high on a sandbar,
grandfathers are lolling above the Arkansas River--
guitars in their laps, cloth caps like Cagney
down over their eyes.
A woman is strumming a banjo.
Another adjusts her bowtie and boiled shirtwaist.
And in the half light, the frogs begin from their sleep
to ascend into darkness.
Vespers recalibrate through the underbrush, the insect choir
offering its clear soprano out of the vaulted gum trees,
into the stained glass of the sky.
Almost 95 years to the day I saw Ellison Smith passed out
on the back seat of an Oldsmobile 88
in the spring of 1952, in Biltmore Forest, North
Carolina, who then rose up from the dark of his 16th year
and said to the nothingness, "Where are we?
Who's driving this goddamn thing?"
My great-grandfather stepped off the boat
from the archduchy of Upper Austria
and headed north to the territory,
and into another war here, just past the Mississippi,
on the Arkansas.
I don't know that it was such a great blessing sending us
to Arkansas, but it was so regarded at the time,
and we're grateful to General Jackson.
Still, don't let me die as grandmother did, suddenly
on a steamboat stuck fast on a sandbar,
unable to get to Little Rock.
And it was four years later, a volunteer
captain in the Confederacy, and took a Minie ball in his palate
at Chickamauga he carried there until his death
almost half a century afterwards,
and wrote a poem back to the widow of one of his men
about a sure return, "where a life is not
a breath, nor life's affections, transient fire in heaven's
light."
He was captured again and wounded again,
confined for two years at Rock Island Prison,
and came back to Little Rock and began his career,
and died at 66--
a ticket to Cuba stored flat in his jacket pocket.
When Jesus walked on the night grass,
they say not even the dew trembled.
Such intricate catechisms of desire--
such golden cars down the wrong side of the sky.
Each summer in Little Rock, like a monk
in his cell saying the lesson over and over until it
is shining, all day I'd prove up my childhood
till lights out snapped on the fireflies who
floated like miniature jellyfish off the reefs of the sleeping
porch, whose jasmine and rose scented air broke over me
back and forth before I could count the half of them,
and settled me under.
This was before I was 10.
That year my grandfather-- my look alike on the sandbar--
died, the war ended, and nothing was ever the same way again.
His mantelpiece clock sits on my dresser now, still
gilded and 19th century.
Devotion, remember, is what counts.
Without it, you're exiled, twisted, and small.
The next morning we play golf, four holes on the back side,
trailing our footprints like paired bodies emptied and left
out to dry in the web of sunlight
and wet grass behind us over the clipped fairways.
My grandmother and I, up before anyone else each day
I was there.
The sun, already a huge hot thumb at 7 o'clock
on our bare heads.
Later, its print still warm on my forehead, sunset like carrot
juice down the left pane of the sky
into the indeterminacy of somewhere else.
I'd roll the tarpaulin down and up
on the sleeping porch, the frog shrill and insect
shrill threading out of the bushes as palpable
as a heart string, whatever that was back then.
Always in memory.
To speak of the dead is to make them live again.
We invent what we need.
Knot by knot, I untie myself from the past
and let it rise away from me like a balloon.
What a small thing it becomes.
What a bright tweak at the vanishing point--
blue on blue.