In Response To A Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned

Do you like where you live? I was going through one of those Facebook quizzes, this one called "44 Things," when my mind got a little stuck on that question. I've lived here longer than I've lived anywhere else in my entire life. I hated it at first because it's so cold and gray for so much of the year. But it's pretty stupid to hate the place you live, so I've worked hard to find things to like. That's easy in May. As the person from California who I met last night said to me, "it's so green here."

I want to be less like the singer of the Uncle Bonsai song "Send my body home," who isn't happy anywhere she goes (you can see the lyrics here at Yellow Tail Records if you page down). I think my favorite lines are "I don't like Alabama/ I was there when it was raining."

As part of my learning-to-like-Ohio project, I've been reading James Wright, among other native Ohio poets. But some days, Wright just isn't much help:

In Response To A Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned

I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream, from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.

I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors swing open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.

I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?

For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores;
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.

Wait, maybe this poem does help. As I told one of my students after class last week, I think that if a person's response to an inappropriate sexual overture is clueless and innocent enough, the moment can sometimes pass that person by, untouched. Because you see what you're looking for. If you're looking for grayness and ugliness in everything, you can certainly find it here, even in May. So I'm trying to focus on the green right now. I have to drive two hours to a soccer game tomorrow afternoon, and it's always a pleasure to unfold my chair and sit in the sunlight on the green grass for an hour and a half, watching the game... some of the time. The other parents mostly know enough not to ask me the score. Because if you keep score, you miss some things!

Do you like where you live? Is it an effort?

Not Tired of Summer

We've had an almost unprecedented string of warm, sunny days in Ohio lately. The forecast says we're due to get some Fay rain (say that ten times fast and you'll think of a big monkey), but right now the sun is streaming through the leaves of a nearby tree and it's making me think of the delightful indolence of this poem, one of my perennial favorites, James Wright's Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota:

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and come on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Isn't the resonance of that last line wonderful? I read it as ironic, because the poem is not full of regret.

The end of August can be a season for regret, especially if you didn't spend enough time lying in hammocks. Personally, I didn't spend nearly enough time floating on an air mattress on the lake. But what if I did spend enough time doing that? Then I'd be tired of it. The speaker is not tired of lying in the hammock. Maybe the word "waste" comes from someone else, someone who wants him to get up and have supper and take out the trash and sort the laundry so there can be something clean to wear to school tomorrow.