The War of Northern Aggression

June 25 2011

The heat makes us stupid.

And just to prove it

we’re slow talkers,

swirling long vowels around our mouths

like hard sour candy.

We take our Coke in bottles,

that instantly break

into sweat,

beads of clear sweet water

dripping down the glass.

And hold them against

fevered brows, soiled necks

like a cooling poultice.

Sugary liquid

that just increases our thirst.

Pavement, with heat shimmering off,

a broken mosaic

of asphalt and weeds.

Dust blurs the horizon, paints the sunset red,

and the sun

like a dying ember

still putting-out heat.

We sit in the shade,

a tin awning,

that’s pitted by hail

and makes such a clatter in the rain

no one talks.

Today, hot enough to burn

any fool who touched it.

We look warily

at strangers,

who are probably lost

trying to get back to the Interstate.

And reminisce

about The War of Northern Aggression

as if we’d been there,

when Lincoln freed the slaves

and millions perished.

As if nothing much has happened

since,

as if the world

hadn’t shifted.

And even if it did

we would sit,

waiting for a breath of air

on this baking plain

West Texas.

Watching , as the sun descends,

a dull red ball, that seems immense

so close to the horizon.

And overhead, wings outstretched

a turkey vulture rides the thermals,

super-heated air

whisking him up.

In slow wide circles

peering down.

As the US Civil War is still called, in some parts -- south of the Mason Dixon line, that is.

I really just wanted to write about heat. (Heat I’m still waiting for, this stubborn summer.) The thought of which immediately conjured up a steaming bayou in Louisiana, a baking plain somewhere south. West Texas won. I guess dry heat seemed more like it. I’m rather pleased I managed to resist that clichéd tumbleweed, rolling down Main St. unobstructed.

Of course, the poem ended up being about more than high summer. It’s also about xenophobia, stereotyping (theirs, as well as ours), and clinging to a dying vision of a mythologized past. But most of all, it demands that you read it slowly, taking in the dregs of this hot, seemingly endless, day.