You come and stand in every door

You come and stand
in every door saying
that it's time to get going.

This before dew the evaporates
from the slats of lawn chairs
that bake under the all day sun.
Cars, new and used and
with accents locked in lines of grill to headlight,
becomes thick as my tongue
at noon when I dream of
meals, eyes open,
u-hauls and trailer homes
leaving for cooler towns up north.

Announcers in steam bath booths
undo their ties,
the playing field grass is brown,
balls are felled in zones of death,
announcers are drunk and lose their tongues
as a lather of news, weather and sports
follows the lead of the citizenry and departs up he trail, Interstate 5, alias North.

You stand in every door,
monotonous as the suburbs that choke
the shrubs that peak
over the edges of canyons,
dry wall and plaster preserves the ice plant.
I loose my tongue thinking how far
I'd travel over how many state lines
in the grace of the chase
after Manifest Destiny
to see a glimpse from the corner of the eye
that is worried now, crows feet, witches kiss,
just an accidental glimpse
of you coming from a neighbor's house
clutching Tupperware and a deck of cards.

TV aerials from
the eaves of patio living
claw the sky,
the feet of a million dead crows,

Winter settles over the land like a sheet,
there are many servings of
cold shoulder on
disrupted kitchen tables,
advertisements along the road
poke out from pine groves
In addition, promise hot meals in
a grunting language
at forthcoming restaurants under
the cloverleaf
in the dry riverbed
where the welcome mats are always wet with rain
the local weatherman lied about.
The entrance of the towns
that are passed through
are studded with banks and gas stations
that close after lunch.

You stand in all doors of all houses and obscure apartments where I lived
waiting for magic to happen again
for anyone else dies and
makes their way free of welcome mats, chimes,
door bells, registered mail,
you talk to me about the scratches on my record collection
as if the wear of years
had something to do
with the lyric sheets
with italicized letters
reading feedi the poor,
clothing the naked ,
end war,
and keep love lasting
until even the cornerstones of
the ugliest buildings
are worn away by weather.

Strangely, I look up
and I'm in gymnasiums again,
dances, registered desire, long hair,
wire glasses, jeans tight as snake skin,
hips and knees triangulating
new laws of form and sex to drums
and long guitar solos that
get lost in the rafters
along the Big Band music
that was rapture, the charge of horns,
sky diving trumpets even then,
the noise was power,
and we'd be marching
to live a life based on album notes,
scratchy vinyl records played backwards by hand,

All the rooms I walked into
where you already were,
all the cigarette smoke and
body oil, I look down again,
at an underground newspaper
that sold me what I believed,

You stand in doors
you choose
because the light
of living room windows
is your idea
of peace in a world
that builds walls
around its walls to the extent
that almost everyone forgets what `s protected.
I am still thinking of drinking up what's left
in hours when the hands of the clock
just stop like that,

I think I might ask you to stay.

I'm going to try to take this on, Ted.

I think it is a bit long and sometimes tedious, more than a meal, perhaps.

But I especially like the record collection riff. I like the idea that within this collection, the scratched records, is the history of your idealism and your naivite. There is a poetry in there, how your idealism has been scratched itself over time, to simplify a bit, and yet, how it is still there, to some degree, although no longer phonically perfect, if you will.

Yes, time takes its toll on both your record collection and your ideals, but you retain both, although they may both be imperfect now. And, to leap right to the end, this is why you decide to keep her.

It is troubling that I am reading about a collection of records and thinking of the folkies and the rockers of the 60s, and then you spring the Big Band era on me. Suddenly, I am not sure that we are in the same ballpark, re my above thoughts about idealism. Not that there is anything wrong with Big Band music. I happen to enjoy it myself. But it seems out of place, perhaps because of where I come from in terms of those scratchy records. I was thinking of Dylan and Young and Mitchell and, well, the 60s.

Everything else you write, it seems to me, is of the 60s. What you wore, what you heard, what you read, and so the Big Band thing throws me.

I especially like that she stands in all of the doors of all the apartments and all of the houses that you have ever lived in. It follows well from its precedents. Once, she dominated your space, your physical area, blocked out the light with her shadow, overwhelmed with her presence, simply by standing in the doorway. Now she dominates your memory, your mind, and in that way, consumes you, again leaping to the end.

Deal is, it makes me think that you hooked up again with a long lost love, and rediscovered the reasons that she so enamored you in the past. And she is much more skillful now or much more beautiful, perhaps, or wiser, in the way that she now does not block the light, but rearranges it.

And you will ask her to stay, if only to see if she is as magical as she appears to be.

I am not sure that she can bring back the past, but I am not sure that you are so interested in that as you are in resurrecting your idealism.

This is a good take on the poem, SF, and you pretty much get the drift (as opposed to aim) of the poem. This is an amalgam of women I've known and know currently. Big band music seemed to fit the section we're talking about, since I refer obliquely to the Rapture and the second coming. At the point where heaven intervenes in earthly affairs, I think we'd horn choruses of horns, Ellington , Basie and Goodman, rather than Power chords and hysterical , high pitched guitar solos.

At the point where heaven intervenes in earthly affairs, I think we'd horn choruses of horns, Ellington , Basie and Goodman, rather than Power chords and hysterical , high pitched guitar solos.

Hmm. When heaven finally intervenes in my earthly affairs, I'm kinda hoping for "Stairway to Heaven."