Wal-Mart

July 26 2013


The parking lot, outside Wal-Mart
is crammed with cars.
Family vans,
windows smudged

with sticky hands
noses, pressed to glass.
Practical sedans

suspension sagging,

rusted dents
from backing half-asleep.
No Audis or Jags
to speak of.

In the furthest reaches
pick-ups, hauling campers
RVs, guzzling gas,
scattered, haphazardly.
Some big diesel rigs
idling smoke.

It feels like the crossroads of America,
with license plates
from distant States, and Provinces,
motoring off
on the ritual summer road-trip.
The asphalt is old,
with cracks and folds
where every depression is obvious,
topped
with standing water
from the recent storm.
When rain pounded down
as if shot from nail guns,
thunder that could loosen dental work.

Steaming pools
with floating coffee cups, drunkenly tipped,
rainbows of oil
glistening slickly.

At the 3-way stop
drivers are courteous, take their turn.
Until a nice lady
from Tennessee, or Mississippi
finds herself paralyzed

by indecision,

making everybody testy.
Meanwhile, shoppers cross,
carts over-topped
with the frugal necessities.
Which a mom navigates one-handed
in a gymnastic tour de force,
the other straining to stop
her chubby toddler
straggling into traffic
a heartbeat away.

I find a spot
at the far end of the lot,
watch the stop/start procession of cars

cruising the rows.
Decide to shop later
                                       ...somewhere else
                                                                           ...make do,

                                                                                                 full-speed down the freeway
                                                                                                                           anywhere new.

A confession: yes, I do shop at Wal-Mart. Their fresh produce is surprisingly good. The new one is right on my way, twice each day. I know that abundant cheap stuff at rock-bottom prices squeezes producers, homogenizes the civic square; and that the best this race-to-the-bottom capitalism can produce is low quality obsolescence. Nevertheless, and despite my sneering superiority, I've allowed myself to be seduced by convenience.

It used to be a Zellers. The parking lot betrays the age and neglect of that defunct and not much lamented chain. But where it used to be a desert of crappy asphalt, it's now bustling and humming with traffic: evidence of savvy marketing and a ruthlessly efficient business; which, however reluctantly, you can't help but admire. In summer, of course, that means lots of interesting license plates ...a hint of the wider world. Most of the cars suggest harried family life, as well as the lower middle class: nothing too new or high end, and in which only the needed repairs -- not the cosmetic ones -- get done.

Each stanza seems objectively descriptive. But toward the end of each there is a small caution of darkness: the dented car; the diesel exhaust; the discarded cups bobbing about in an oil slicked pool (OK, that one may lack the desired subtlety!); the heartbeat away from disaster. The storm -- although only briefly alluded to -- is a kind of pathetic fallacy, reinforcing the sense of malign undercurrent: perhaps through our disconnection from a discontented nature. The final stanza, with the words "freeway" and "new", not only calls back to that "ritual summer road trip", but hints at the powerful American trope of the open road: that is, the trope of of the frontier; of escape; of re-invention.

Wal-Mart -- with its handy implication of mass consumerism and lowest-common-denominator -- is an easy target, I know. In my defence, this poem came from experience: the Wal-Mart of the poem wasn't just a heavy-handed symbol conjured up in the service of a pet theme.