“Good Morning,” a poem by Robert Farrell.
Suburban rivalries.
Good Morning
*
The snow has fallen for what seems like weeks and still
we wait for the car exhaust, the piss of countless dogs,
but for now the trash is hidden and you know how it
gets in winter when too much time goes by. The list
grows exponentially until there are far too many people
to call or text or write, but it’s like we’ve always said,
Hello, how have we never been to Montauk together?
It’s the perfect time of year, now and late October, when
the fishermen haven’t yet arrived and the bankers still prefer
to weekend in warmer climes, like Turks and Caicos or
Barbuda, say, leaving us the whole horizon and an epoch’s
worth of sand. And, happily, we don’t need a soul
to water plants or feed our cats because what we have
are books, the little golden ones our favorites, and of course
each other. Let’s go right now and forget that we can’t
keep a succulent alive, no, not even a small jade, which takes
real skill to kill. But, look. On just two shelves we have our
own menagerie: a couple of pigs, one realistically portrayed
except it’s made of rubber, the other but a play on pig, a
beautiful plastic smiling thing, two hippopotami, a porcupine,
a blue-footed booby, and a mountain you once climbed
that now stands between a laughing Buddha and Glenn
Gould. Yes, home is what we illocute as such, a speech
act like this thing we call a marriage even if it’s mostly
laughter. It’s how here it is, our common work of art,
both in the Bronx and of the city that never lets us sleep.
I don’t find it sad (do you?) that we can’t identify
the flowers and birds we see in parks. Isn’t it enough
to hear their names and love them and declare ourselves
heliotropes when we wake on Sunday and find that all
we want are waffles, the pleasures of late capitalism,
and bellinis all of which are best enjoyed away from
war zones? And just what is vermiculite anyway? It
reminds me of Francis Bacon, the philosopher not the
painter, Baron of Verulam, Viscount of St. Albans,
even though it’s only a hydrated laminar mineral that’s
sometimes added to soil. Or could it be the winter that
jogs the memory, for wasn’t it a frozen chicken that
did him in? Or was it snow? Experiments in refrigeration
can be dangerous, but that’s no excuse for why I haven’t
had the ice-maker repaired. I’d say I could almost hear him
speak to us from out the horn of this Victrola, amazed
by our technologies, but looking down his nose a bit at
all these bibelots that serve no purpose. But that’s
nobility for you. It’s always five o’clock in the Cedar
Tavern, which is gone, thank god, and so no longer calls
for yet another metacritique of our sixteen-year-old
selves or the poets we loved so much at that age. For they,
like us, witnessed casualties, too, watched the Fat Man work
his wonders and grew up in the shadow of depressions. Who
could blame them if they forced a joi de vivreas others might
force bulbs? Perhaps it takes a farmer’s son to cultivate a
field within a town that only offers windows on the world
through which you almost at times expect to see the Spruce
Goose float down upon the Hudson, slow and with the
pendulous grace of something serious said in passing.
**************************************
Robert Farrell’s chapbook, Meditations on the Body, was published by Ghostbird Press in 2017, and his poems have appeared in Magma, Posit, The Brooklyn Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Poetry South, and elsewhere.
