Oh, the next poem I'm going to read
is called the Grease is the Word,
and it requires just a bit of explaining
since it's a little bit of an alphabet soup, that is to say,
there are lots of detached letters floating around
through the poem.
The genesis of the poem, I guess,
was listening to the radio and hearing the song Grease is
the Word, realizing that I'd had a girlfriend in the 1950s, when
I was about eight, whose first name began with the letter J.
And that left the letters H and I in the middle between G
for grease and J for my girlfriend,
and it seemed like a kind of auspicious possibility.
I should also say, that R and S, who turn up later in the poem,
in the wrong order, were also real people,
so it's an autobiographical poem, in a sense.
And, for those of you who don't know,
the Teddy Bears were a fairly mediocre women's Rock
and Roll group in the mid-1950s.
So.
"Grease is the word which begins with the letter G which
begins the poem, but J was first in your heart and mind in 1958.
Between them is the word Hi, waving
in the slowed down breeze like a very old pennant shaming
the spanking new mystery of the flagpole,
shining militarily in the dully gleaming air of today.
Air of August, 1958 swarmed with bees resolutely attacking
the pomade defended hair, which stood in attentive alarm,
a dark brown green.
Reflexive hands descended like the gritted swatters
of judgment.
The bees were stunned and dropped like snowflakes
into the oven trimmed grass of the athletic field then wobbled
off like drunks toward third base.
They played by different rules.
Miraculous not a single hair of a single head was harmed,
the mystery of the scalp remained intact.
Then the friend imitating Elvis Presley was much prized,
and he who could parade his mother to the drugstore to be
treated to a soda became a man.
1958 had a father too and time to learn all the words
to all the songs.
Oh why was I born too late, thus mourned the Teddy Bears.
It wasn't all that bad.
The pennant droops pleasurably relaxing attestation.
In those days, 1958, was young though and just about
asking for it.
It said, if you didn't feel what I felt out
on the bridge you don't feel about me like I feel about you.
The other end hung up.
Time fixed it.
After a while it learned its lesson and settled down.
It sits quietly now raising its hand
when it wants to be called on.
Others were squirming and roiling up against confines
of their wooden seats.
Glued roistering toward the becalmed curriculum
where the catamaran lounged sulkily through Canandaigua
in a silky breeze of the decade's avatars.
This may be written having acquired its art.
Young ones were busily splashing their powers
laboring toward the statement which emerged
in the murmured undertow.
1968, moans mother.
1975, whimpers father feeling orphaned in the big classroom
where windy light will be best for them after all.
As we know, 1958 was rambunctious too
in its day and frisk the gambles for which that decade is not
unjustly famed.
It was later, things let themselves be disheveled,
mixed up, and one day unaccountably R
appeared after S and punctured the sibilance
of a proper reading with its growls.
Then 1975 was in love with percussion, syncopated effects,
and jumped in and out of bed with no one becalmed
in the fidgets to call it Procrustean intent on tickling
each other pink.
Through the sheet-like grid much would be filtered and expunged
and forms would appear looking pleased in the solution.
More would be there to say, bevel
toward an arrangement which felt like waking inhaling
deeply the newly inverted air.
But now you were asking, why I have told you this.
The afternoon would be bent on making
it clearer, fantastic accretion sliding
across your hand, enlarged in the blurred projections,
swarming the landscaped skin heading home to the vanishing
point, annunciated firmly.
Then the hand reached out for the contents,
the rummaged container of everything needful
for moving on into the next moment.
And it is good to remember how each one emptied
into its brother, and constituted a quantity of it
which remained constant.
After, there came the buzz of soothed down excitement.
Reaching Z it was time for the nap.
Sleep slowly rolling sounds in which
the years lay down their heads on their desks
and dreamed of letters blending in the recitation.
1958 would begin to dream of itself, as well.
The nightmares of '68 and '75, feeling better
for having been moved through the larger than life-like
choreography.
Though the school yard was empty,
the pennant beat time to the wind.
The vibrating flagpole slowly twanged.
We seem to be those who knew the afternoon lesson would take
place, as outside trees glided dimly away,
erased, and regathered beneath the somnambulant hand
of the dark."