4601. SHADOW ON THE LAWN

SHADOW ON THE LAWN
To talk about the shadow on the lawn
I cannot go on, for the same distant voices
are calling me anew. A dawntime reverie,
here on the green my head still sleeps. I
rouse my shadow as well, and move along.
Now is the time for catching up.
-
'Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently
drunk, loving and pugnaciously drunk.' I read...
that once and cinched my face tight. 1926,
Sinclair Lewis a Philip Roth was not. This
tight space: the girl in the running tights,
this sinner obsessed with the devil, the
shadow on the lawn.
-
There is no defining characteristic to the glitter
and the gold. Today it feels like a hundred degrees,
and I am crossing at Easton that great divide -
some monument to pugnacious Lilly and her
sickeningly dead Civil War boys already cuts
my eye. I want none of it. Rural boobies,
boosters, and religious hucksters all.
-
Who is it now shall throw a bridge across yon
fading river? It would seem that no one cares,
as the men with arms and rifles still enter here,
still climb the shore in their riverbank shoestrings
to parrot these lines before dying -
-
'We are free but we fight to be free and we
fight for our freedom but we are not free not
to fight. Let us lie down to die. This river tires
us out.' Old boys from 200 years back, I am
listening still, and you are all shadows on the
lawn, my shadows on the lawn.