Larry’s Pinnacle Moment by Scott Owens

after Tim Peeler

 

Even Larry had to wonder
what the hell they were thinking
to invite someone like him to Fenway Park
to read what he calls poetry in front of owners
and lawyers and serious sportswriters
and baseball stadium poet laureates.

They must not have known that he was born
from almost nothing and still had almost nothing
except the good sense his daddy gave him
and an appreciation of good whiskey.

They must not have known, until he pulled up
in front of the posh Commonwealth Hotel
and as the bellboy picked up his one
cheap bag, he asked, “Ya’ll know which way
it is to the bar?” that for him poetry
wasn’t Take Me Out to the Ball Game
or Casey at the Bat, but much rougher stuff,
busted mill house porch, contours
of darkness hovering over terraced field.

They must not have known that for him
the real heart of baseball would always beat
on a Legion field next to a cotton mill
somewhere north of Cherryville, North Carolina.

They must not have known that even with baseball
which he knew to be one of the few good things
left, he’d tell it the way it was,
full of greed and labor law, and mostly memory
of how things couldn’t be anymore.

Somewhere Norman by Scott Owens

Somewhere Norman wonders
what happened to all the days
and nights that seemed to lie before him.

Somewhere Norman remembers
all the words he thought to say,
meant to say, never
brought himself to say.

Somewhere Norman regrets
he never let himself be wrong
enough to find the way
to make himself right.

Somewhere Norman knows
he let those who mattered
most mostly down.

Somewhere Norman feels
alone.

Somewhere Norman dreams
of things that could have been,
should have been, would have
been, if only he
had learned to be a little
less Norman, a little
more human, a little
somebody, somewhere,
but not here,
never here again.

The Improbability of Poetry as Religion by Scott Owens

Poetry will never be a religion,
though its adherents are zealots
and believe it can lead to epiphany,
salvation, the thing with wings,
though its mythology is complete
and just as sordid as any
faith worth its salt,
full of desire and incest,
fallacy and betrayal,
though it engenders spirituality,
morality, sanctimony,
though it places the word first.

Still, none have gone to war for poetry,
or hell for not believing in pantoums.
None have been denied matrimony,
public office or citizenship
for practicing metaphor, assonance,
the shameless pursuit of meter.

No, poetry will never be a religion,
for it knows no heresy or sacrilege,
asks no one to die for it,
and offers no unassailable answers.

Three Poems by Scott Owens

Portrait of the “New” South as a Pick-up Truck

Big and gray,
jacked up for clearance,
floating on 33s,
gun rack in the back window,
stag silhouette overlooking
community college sticker,
check it out as I storm
past on the disappearing interstate
merge lane, nearly forcing
your Prius off the road,
dangling from the unused
trailer hitch, oversized,
chrome-plated, flashing in sunlight,
even my truck has balls.

____________
Yellow Xterra

With the rear seat folded up
he could just fit stretched out
in the back of the yellow Xterra,
but he was exceedingly happy that
with the rear seat folded up
he could just fit stretched out
in the back of the yellow Xterra.

Through tinted glass he saw
a perfect sky of stars,
broken only by shapes of leaves,
knew the quiet of solitude,
absence of expectation.

The problem with desire, he said,
is the unlikelihood of satisfaction.

____________

On the Idea of Poetic Responsibility

I want to call in sick today
and stay home and write poetry.
I am sick, after all,
sick of clock-watching and making a living.
sick of dry-erase boards
and overstuffed books of overread literature.
sick of Frost and students,
not that any of them have done anything wrong.
I love Frost, and on any other day
I might want nothing more than to be with my students
and hear how they too have promises to keep,
and help them see the slipperiness of Frost.
But today there are more important things to do.
There is reverie and reflection.
There is memory to be pursued.
There are trails diverging in my mind.
There is this poem, and there is you
waiting for all the promises to be filled.

Four Poems by Scott Owens

Three Wishes

It’s no wonder we never get very far
despite a world of wishes.
So many waste the first
simply proving it’s true,
endless sausages, a donkey’s head
on the man next door, and then spend
the second undoing the foolish first,
meatballs instead of rain, pigs that fly.
The real damage, however,
comes in thinking too big
on the last one, the loved one back
from the dead (uncleaned, health unimproved)
a mountain of wealth we suffocate under,
world peace (achieved through rapture).

____________

A Short Ride with Scott Owens

–Hey Scott, Teachers are some my favorite people.

RT— What and where do you teach?

Scott–I teach creative writing, composition, and literature at Catawba Valley Community College, as well as creative writing workshops across the country.

RT— What led you into that profession?

Scott–Throughout my rather tortured childhood, it was always teachers who seemed to show me the way to better possibilities, so to me being a teacher always seemed the best thing one could do.

RT— Back when you started writing poetry, who did you emulate?

Scott–Early on I emulated Frost to a fault.  Fortunately, I discovered Galway Kinnell as an undergraduate, but both men’s poetry remain deeply influential in my writing.

RT–If you could have a do-over..what would it be?

Scott— I don’t really believe in do-overs.  Changing one thing would inevitably change many others as well.  If I could magically isolate one choice so that everything else remained unchanged, I would skip my second marriage.

RT–So if Scott Owens had “two minutes”?

Scott–If I had two minutes, I’d like to make love to my wife, but that’s a lot of pressure.  I think I’d rather just take my wife and daughter and start walking into the closest beautiful patch of woods I could find.

www.scottowenspoet.com www.scottowensmusings.blogspot.com www.poetryhickory.com www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com www.234journal.com www.poetrycouncilofnc.wordpress.com

Congress by Scott Owens

In a room made of alabaster walls
set round with a hundred distinguished chairs
and the random exhalation of nothing,
the men argue the future of heads.

The men argue for random nothings,
petty pet projects, alabaster pretensions,
set round with a hundred strutting chairs,
oblivious to the future of heads.

Walled in with random pet projects
of alabaster distinguished men,
the future of heads exhales nothing
in a room set round with unmoving chairs.

The future of alabaster walls crumbles,
distinguished chairs collapse beneath
the weight of a hundred unmoving men.
What remains is less than nothing.

13 Ways of Places by Scott Owens

1
The first place I remember —
a wide chair, 2 babies
in the seat, my brother and I
astride each arm.

2
A place we came back to
year after year, every time
a man left or hit us,
7-acre farm full of chickens,
corn, cows, tomatoes,
2 boys in 2 single beds.

3
On Phoenix Street, behind the KFC,
I learned to ride a bike,
and when the trash can
caught on fire,
I was beaten for lying
until it blew up.

4
My mother’s nose is bloodied,
my brother saved by not
being able to reach the gun,
every night punctuated by trains
going anywhere but here.

5
What could be better
than a bedroom of my own,
window onto a wide front porch,
until a lovesick neighbor
knocked on the door at night,
pulled a gun
and emptied his stomach before me.

6
No doubt the worst place
we ever lived,
downhill from everywhere,
a place for runoff to collect.

7
The streets here breathe
with overarching steam.
Night and day
the rumbling of machinery
causes voices to rise.

8
This close to history, to other,
I had to teach myself the language,
find ways to venture down the Rhine,
south to mountains
without my family’s help.

9
Little wonder I got out early.
What does it say of a marriage
to remember nothing that matters
of the places it lived?

10
Who could use a house
with 7 bedrooms, 5 baths?
Who could keep it clean,
living on campus
in the Headmaster’s house,
myself master of nothing.

11
I always wanted to write
poems of place,
but having lived
in 14 cities, 34 houses,
I never knew
which place to write about.

12
Nearing 48,
the seventh year in this house,
the longest I’ve ever lived
in one place, I undertake
the permanence of a treehouse,
the only structure I’ve ever made.

13
Even as a child I knew,
left alone, I would walk out
in Cade’s Cove and lie down
and wait for deer to consume
my body turned to grass.

Two Poems by Scott Owens

To Whom It May Concern

Dear Sir (or Madam),
The life that you sent me doesn’t work.
I’m returning it herein
and expect a full refund.
Please find enclosed the following:
One clueless mom;
she tries but really can’t manage
(perhaps future models
should come with fewer children
and greater self-esteem);
Three men who want to be called
Daddy but don’t deserve the title
(please note the cowardice,
drunkenness, rage and stupidity
they bear were not of my doing);
One tattered file of memories
undoubtedly inaccurate and incomplete;
One crummy job after another;
One string of failed relationships,
all my fault;
One disappointing body wracked
with pain, guilt, confusion;
One shattered set of ideals;
An indeterminate number
of vague promises, uncertain
answers; One bag of dreams,
empty but unfulfilled.

____________

Just What the Hell Is

black and white? I mean
Billy Mays is dead and still
trying to sell me armbands
that hold nails and hammer,
Jupiter Jack, Awesome
Auger, Instant Scratch
Remover, I mean we
celebrate Christopher Columbus
because he discovered
a continent already populated
by millions and then  tried
to kill, rape, convert, enslave
those millions, I mean
what part of Christian theology
isn’t prefigured
by stories from other religions
condemned by Christian theology
because their stories weren’t
Christian, I mean is everything
as arbitrary as one-fourth
human, one-eighth black,
one-sixteenth native-American,
and I had a student once
who claimed pure blood
because she was descended
from the von Trapp family,
I mean am I the only one
who remembers
that Maria was an orphan?

Do me a favor,
if you’re not comfortable
with the definition of river
being constantly changing
molecules of water roughly
bordered by eroding banks,
the pull of gravity,
and the saturation point
of muddy soil, then just
shut the hell up!

Three Poems by Scott Owens

Wet

Nothing smells as wet
as peanuts boiling
in a blue metal pot
on an iron woodstove
surrounded by old men in overalls
and farmboys in caps
in a country store named Crooks or Norman’s
at an intersection with no light
in a place that couldn’t be called a town
but still has a sign that says
Midway, Stony Point, or Mock’s Corner.

_____________________

Misunderstanding Elvis

We’re raising Sawyer Jewish,
but living in the South,
you can’t escape Christianity,
and she’s heard enough of Christmas
to know a bit about elves,
so when we visit Dairy Queen
and the local Elvis is singing
along the edge of the road,
she concludes he’s too big for an elf
and asks why Santa Claus
would call someone a Hound Dog.

_______________________

According to Hollywood

They don’t ever get it right in the movies,
the places where poor people live.
All the dogs there have mange
and most of the houses too,
crumbling foundations, paint
cracked and peeling, blinds
that won’t close, front porches
packed with worthless junk
they’d never throw away,
yards cluttered and bare.
Even some of the people have mange,
missing arms or eyes,
smelling of booze and diesel fuel,
fingers stained by cigarettes,
faces older than their days.

We never owned a lawnmower,
not until I was seventeen.
Apartments never had lawns,
and nothing but scattered weeds
would grow from rock yards
along the tracks or up
from sand beneath pine trees.
And something was always broken,
reaching through the hole in the screen
to open the door, carrying
water from stove to tub,
leaving the lights on in one
room to illuminate another.

According to Hollywood
being poor means little more
than no shoes, a single-wide
trailer, clothes that are too big,
and a smudge that only helps
to make you even cuter.
In the movies, even the poorest
of kids are miraculously clean
and always happy despite
being hungry in all the ways
a child can be hungry.