Читать книгу Run the Red Lights - Ed Skoog - Страница 11

Ode to the Macarena

The chair I’m sitting on is mostly nothing.

Electrons go right through it. Memory, which

is electricity, seems lighter than a scatter

and yet in the inexplicable universe I’m there

again, and it’s now again, summer of the Macarena.

Two months in Abilene, Kansas, and I see

nobody in the central air of the Sunflower Hotel.

My eighth-floor window stares down buttery hills.

Streetlights pink the tracks downtown

like a chalk outline to fill in later.

I’m writing a novel set among historians

working at the Eisenhower Library.

I go to its chapel daily, sit before his tomb

then sit in my kitchenette, alone and twenty-three.

Some weekends I drive to Kansas City

where a woman who won’t need me

lets me stay over, though at sex I’m still a boy,

as at rigorous thinking, naive, unskilled,

fascinated by form and lazy about content,

but I work the paths that lead from myself.

Ike stays a boy, winning the worst war.

As president little happened we praise him for,

and by we I mean the characters,

among the adult troubles they fall into

and I don’t understand. This summer

at the Democratic Convention in Chicago,

where the man who gives Leaves of Grass

away carelessly will be renominated,

the delegates keep doing the macarena

every time I look at the lobby TV.

The vice president claims during his speech

to be doing the macarena, but does not move,

then offers to demonstrate it again. Presidents

are always late in the day of their time.

Like dances, our political lives come and go.

It’s the summer of all dances, coffee leaping

in the percolator, gravity-defiant solitude,

and through the window, houses and fields

seduced in their own passing crazes

of seasons, life and death, which won’t need me.