Читать книгу Red Rover Red Rover - Bob Hicok - Страница 18

A lament, pep talk, and challenge walk into a bar

Banjo. Zither. Carnegie Hall. The Four Tops and Seasons.

Greek chorus. Music of the spheres and triangles

and dodecahedrons. The Kinks. The Mozarts

and Fats Wallers and Puentes. The Butthole Surfers.

My office is bigger and more flexible than my heart

and this is a weird way to critique my affections

but so be it: the intervention is under way. Do you feel

small? I feel tiny lately. Like a good person

would remove the doors of his house and give the poor

a controlling interest in JPMorgan and storm congress

with onesies and pillows and hold that flotilla of egos

hostage in a sleepover until the Kindness Act is passed

unanimously and do unto others goes from words

dropped in the suggestion box to law. Why aspire

to the part of a thimble when galaxies

are shinier role models? I should be putting meals

on wheels or moving Miami to a higher elevation

or helping strangers with their calculus homework.

I speak shovel, yammer hammer, have drills and bits,

wrenches and jigs, elbows and frontal lobes, and have noticed

when I throw up my hands in frustration

they come back, that they take their responsibilities

to hold and carry seriously, and so should I

be a ladle or hammock, spoon or cradle, a yodel

or some other reaching across the distance

to the factions and splinter groups of the tribe

or clan of woman and man. It’s no accident I began

this meandering with music: no two species

could come from more distant planets

than a Steinway and sax,

yet listen to how well they get along

when they put their mouths where our fears are,

when they lend us our better-tuned selves. My ears

were raised by Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, so I hum

and flow and stumble, rasp and trance and moan

between two sets of certainties, that we are angelic

junkies, fallen and blind, and that we can rise

and see. The deepest soundtrack of my being

is a black man and the Man in Black

breathing into me the one and only commandment:

Don’t just have but be a soul.