Carl Boon
Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American literature at Dokuz Eylül University.
BICENTENNIAL
I.
Dozens of moths
in the air of the lamplit porch.
In the dark beyond
the fireworks boom, and beyond them
the sounds of a thunderstorm.
The humidity whispers,
and we Ohioans talk and drink,
acquainted with the muddy ozone air
engulfing us. The subject is America,
what it means to live here,
and Gary’s drunk. He’s always drunk,
but today is special. Today the country
wants to know itself again. “For Americans,”
says Gary, “I’ll take a Robert Frost
and raise you a Teddy Kennedy.
He’s gonna be the President one day.”
I’m looking to the east, where Butler County
with its dozen Burger Kings
is turning purple in the firework haze.
We think Gary’s an idiot.
Nobody reads Frost anymore,
and Chappaquiddick and gas prices
and our younger brother Roy,
one of the last to leave Saigon,
slices his ankles nightly with a penknife
and stays in the basement. We love him,
but he sees Russians in the pantry,
hears VC in the closet, and believes
the rice we eat contains microphones.
II.
It’s been thirteen years since Frost
ambled among New Hampshire’s rocks.
Thirteen years since Kennedy was shot.
Thirteen years since Roy, a handsome boy,
took Darlene Jones to the junior high prom
and got drunk on rotgut gin
and Mad-Dog Apple.
He carried no seabag home,
and arrived bare-chested and thin,
insisting on the basement
and its daytime darkness.
Gary found a Goodwill mattress,
and I visited Sears for sheets and pajamas.
Mother brought the black-and-white TV
and a pair of supper trays. All four of us
went to Kroger’s and stood in the aisles
admiring the breakfast cereals,
the Swenson’s meals, the beers and wines.
Roy wanted Apple Jacks, a tennis ball,
and eight ounces of marijuana,
which I bought from The Asian
who used to live on Redbud Avenue.
We settled in, and for seven weeks
Roy did nothing but watch The Price Is Right
and get high. These things
were America to him, again.
III.
Now the fireworks subside.
Now Butler County can return to what it was
before the pageantry, the flags,
the fire hydrants painted red, white,
and blue. After the President speaks
we’ll resume our regular lives
under regular stars and go back
to bitter subterfuge: the secret siphoning
of gasoline from Pontiacs, the summoning of whores
in the Kroger’s parking lot, Roy’s
insomniac basement pacing,
Gary’s stumbling and Mother’s hip.
We won’t be happy again till fall
when the boys from Mason High School
begin their seasonal thumping
and the marching band plays
“The Star-Spangled Banner” out of tune.
Eventually the snow will come; eventually
the sad Thanksgiving rooms
and Roy not wanting to come up,
the wondering what he does all day,
the turkey dry, the bacon in the endive,
the two inches of snow on Mother’s Chevrolet.
We must do something, Gary will say.
It’s not our business, Mother will say,
and in December the rumors again will come:
the auto plant, the glass factory,
the nimble Japanese and the end of America.
Roy won’t care; he’s already seen it.
IV.
He’s already lived it, and we
are stupid to his dreams and nightmares,
the shadows that scratch his basement walls,
the cobwebs and the TV blare,
the VC boy who keeps him company.
I don’t know what they speak of;
I don’t know how they communicate at all.
Terror, sacrifice, and admonition.
The unbelievable made real, and wasps
alighting on corpses reddened by the sun.
War’s entropy, its disillusionment
and sudden heroes. He, the youngest,
went courageously while Gary studied the poems
of Frost and I waxed Cadillacs for Old Man Peters.
It’ll be a century until we understand,
and even then most of us will get it wrong.
You should listen to Roy
when the sun goes down: his fear
disguised as wistfulness, his elbow
battering the wall. This is happening,
Roy is happening in rural Ohio,
and still we call ourselves Americans.
I wipe the dishes. Gary lingers in the hall.
Mother limps to her Chevrolet.
All of us live in an obscene world.
FOR MARY
Mary of many moonflowers
believes because
believing is better
than the screen door slamming
in the Arkansas wind
and better than Jesus,
almost. Somewhere south
of Little Rock a thunderstorm
rips the sky in half; somewhere
Mary snaps beans because
her father loved them
with bacon, onion, iron,
the meandering horizon
almost growing closer.
He might’ve had a little bourbon;
his body might’ve glowed
a while. She must remember.
We must remember
the ones who lived—
one last sadness in Pine Bluff,
one more journey
to the Crossroads,
and the music that rises
from us all.
