Stalking Poem by Robert Dawson

Stalking


Sorghum on its scaly stalk, green, yellow,
cigarette swipes across soil as black
as Lincoln's winding cloth, swish-swishes hubs
of autos eat or westing through the Middle West.
Each town or township's water tower
stands, like a birthmark, out. Or
a silvery spider bloated on webs
of flourbin streets. Blistered, the screen-
doors rot while mosquitoes strum.
West winds do the cow pies flout … like dustpans
skim dry fallows, swirl, spout
or flume through silos, waking the cows.


Or in blizzard, Nebraska a nightmare's drive,
the engine sludged and creaky. Where the pavement
joints at a bridge, a Ford before yours skates
tailfirst slowly spinning, shivers a gurad rail,
rights in the left pass lane. You squeeze
through its turnstyle. Frightened by grace
and the truck that fronts you dozing in its swath,
mere midway to Fremont into the bank you fluff.
Hardly a chrome strip wrinkled but the generator's snapped
from its braces, the fanbelt dangling snapped. A hitch
hiker, wife and baby with you … Father! … flag
a trucker for the hitch and pray he doesn't slough.


Or backseat headaches from the parallax
of war-effort hybrids sweltering past, the flies
so deep the deepest blind our car
amid tassles level as the burr cut of my hair.
Or foetal in the back seat, Iowa
map over my eyes, my drivemate's
motor stretch: oak, maple, chestnut trudged
under, nine months gate to mottoed arch
exclude us, and snotty gardeners cavort the Yard
at Harvard. Scraping my heels like a toddler after
my scholarship, we and our fellows brave philistine laughter -
wise as iron, good a brick. Rattled asleep,


asleep through construction, auto scudding to a chill
stop at a gas pump shakes me, wakes me. Trucks
we flew past on the blue slopes groaning, each a Noah's Ark -
steep shoals of sounds - chew up my sleep in cuds,
Grubbing for even cash, the gas pump jockeys gasps
at finding me gnarled behind him as he backs us out
and COFFEE COFFEE green and red bulbs shout
of fading seasons. Home, where Christmas was
the first-found lie, unlock the backhall stairs,
years since I put them up to it they've hidden on. Hand
in hand, down. he thin with dark cheekbones, she
like grateful bread, they smiling creep. Some snow

comes in on the collar of an aunt, which melts
like spittle. She has my nose or hair. Outdoors
dead hollyhocks dream, I don't dream what. The sisters
talk in interlocking blocks. Up to above my butt
in snow whose crust once held me stalking rabbits, start
to shortcut through Old Berger's garden plot
and halfway it's a parking lot! Such gloom, can't
read the jingle on a greeting card.
Spoors of shoppers in an almost friend's back yard
alert me. Stalk windfalls! Stalk uncashiered nooks!
Out with the trash cans, where slush lurks, a counter
tilts, cleared out for Christmas lights, unhung with books …
This dream begun one transit is resolved the next.
Lives of the Poets, works of careful men
in vellum, conservative memoirs stuffed
under my sheepskin coat, shoplifting …
Gruffly a voice! Inappropriate thief, caught
with your pants down! As the moon climbs down
a painted ladder, spoke after spoke a loving song,
comes the woman, somewhere not home. Eerie, Canada shore. Feed
corn spreads out practically on the lake. Below the farmer's hat
on a pole, seagulls steal from crows. Michigan, worn
silly from driving this same dream route again alone,
this dream width of America, I camp dead square in town

till spooked by flashlights, told keep moving on.
The lake whose ice I plopped Mel's Buick through
on Mel my uncle's farm once, now a fish preserve
where milkweed smithereens his concrete fish-weir block
by block, and rusty barbwire crimps a pheasant's brood …
passing in August only a mile ort two
from the spring which fed the creek which fed the lake,
I see how muskrats have contrived to break
beavers' hutches open, the beavers long since coats,
then with their nervous generations, thatch on thatch
build up their dam till no fresh water spills.
Some ranger will have himself to tractor them out.

Kerplodding flank to jowl trod tent-hipped Holsteins
down to slabber water, sweating through bald knees,
and back and down from the dooryard till the sedge reeks,
figures of black-white-black muddy my mind.
Six Mile Corner to the cattle grate
I used to think was used for pure design … rut, rust
and pokeweed, gravel tattles a testimony
blow-outs and splintered phone poles alibi.
A tinpan rented rowboat snailing my back,
I leave my car to graze along the fence. Dry perch
eggs smudge a cattail crèche. Chartreuse
scum splatters the lake like flak.



Where a willow's wythes whisk in the sun,
half the lake down, an acolyte bittern
sprains its neck. Mud makes baskets of my shoes,
lost,
sinking.
The rowboat's wake
is alizarin, zinc, black
but clear to the bottom where frog and pike
play dead all winter. There! A carp,
the fish that eats the others playing dead,
bellies up, a white eye, through-the-key-hole flesh.
Now! See what I've brought you here to see:
refracted in petals on the wake's sharp sheen, glass
cracked in fishscale laceries, stains, the silly two-tone
by a sea change rust … Buick with seagrass fins,
Modernity's grail, coffin, reintegrated ghost of things


not seen.
Seen by me.
Being me.
"Cotton candy pinched in gritty wads
pink as girly barrettes, Schlitz in paper tubs.
hands damp, he swings my arm as if a shifting rod.
Past scale game and cultivator to the 4H barn
we trudge. Some boys his age are shampooing a sow.
When we kiss behind a roost he lets his hand
nest on my skirt." But where, with steak and skein, are barned
the state's self-harvesting bumper crop -
the skunk, the muskrat and the carp?
Screaming whispers, intently as lights jig a lipstick ad,
we hug the roller coast whoosh clank into dark …


"… gets colder, darker as wind licks heat from the engine
The lifted hood clatters like drum. Blue,
it makes the snow blue miles about. Pinching my ears,
with no way to shout although the drifts
are mouthing the highway corners, I tap on the back
seat glass, where Jane and Bobby raise a helling squall
of silence, what I hope is hope. A Cadillac
varooms past hauling skirts of sleet. The hitch-
hiker gone three halves of an hour … I should
have offered money. Slowly as an old man winds his clock,
another half hour's cold drools through the car
and then a ranger looms up from Kennard,

his red light glazed and glinting crazily.
He'll radio. But won't take Jane or the baby in his car
and skids away for fear his tires would freeze.
So far as needs to lose sight of the car, each way
less than a flashlight shines, shivering, I
walk and walk. And when the snowstorm lifts
so quickly it congeals in a full moon,
the yellow flashers of a towtruck sloop down
the nearest hill. Someone is boosting Jane
into the cab, the hitch! who turns and grins,
and swears himself blue when we pass the gas
station where they wouldn't wake up. Later coffee and talk."

Naked, I am stalking a dark rusty road with apple trees.
Their leaves clothe me with blotches of Adam's sky.
Over me imperceptibly move purple blue clouds
like God's unbreathed words, then suddenly
Nature in this dream gets rational. Three missiles in a V
make stately passage burning above, their timed return
then surging southward, and these cross. "Until
the straw boss bawled me off, the white cabrón,
for breaking branches, I picked my living wage.
Thos teamsters say what I deserve I got." Amparo
is ashamed I help her pick the drops
the sun broils brown, fit for the cider press.

Having never had to have, my host
who tours me through Chicago spotting
vintages of Gold Coast, insouciantly careening
the inner limited-access belt of the limitless-access
skyway, lives in an Eden of habit. He
does not choose to choose roads not to see
the poor, the bleaching negroes, the blanched whites.
He couldn't find them even to impress
a co-ed, yet brags his thoroughness in sites.
Having only to give, he is the Shylock of gratitude,
frowning when I frown but would not persecute
even that most permanent minority, the good.

"Ploughed earth erodes and splotches grey and brown.
My palms are gray, my arms are brown. I see
white men are men because they ape me when I act
yet I am him to them. Colors as surfaces
oppress me, sure what moves and how, beneath my skin …
less sure if it's I or me." "Beneath its turpentine pines
Tuskegee erodes in Time become timeliness.
Dawdling a sack of grits and macaroons,
through backyard foxtrails known to none I know,
my blond eyes stiff-arm-cradled as a gun, as the negro
boy gawks down the center avenues, I come to school
locked, locked, its lawn's width from us by troops in blue."

Myself, a nerve along which sear
otherwise unfelt oppressions of man.
No word produces me, not
certainly the four bland syllables Robert Dawson
nor that telescope of history a race or country name,
nor the profession that is symbiotic with the culture
that appoints it. I must argue
with any virtue in my poem. Does it apply to me?
Stalling the Ford before my Grandpa's house,
under his crabapple that's threatened roofs for years
doesn't stall the three day's homeward stalking
in my skull. Arms hard with luggage, Joan pokes the bell,

first wife wed to this house with Catholic bells.
Next dawn, sneezed sleepless under feather quilts,
she and my Grandma breakfast in house coats,
spreading a little yeast on melba toast.
Hair cropped above my ears (Rogge, one of brother
bachelors - he can't squat, the other stand,
from football - clips us squirts) I stretch
by the cistern, dreaming this backyard large enough
to travel in. Baking, Joan pictures Cambridge. Grandma ruts
in her button jar of Sunday School pins. They catechize
each other, making my childhood
loaves in white towels.