Three Versions of an Underpass, Somewhere outside Houston

1

invocation, 1982

this is an overpass bridge,

this memory is of shelter,

cry memory, cry our twice-same memory,

this memory is no shelter,

our city, any, always so far away

it doesn’t deserve a name

and to ask too much of you is a crime.

Before we run out of time,

look at us, we’re you, memory, head to toe,

we, our ideas of possibility, laughing your lightning away,

we frozen serially by your headlights

there in a highway rain cave also you.

The alternator is as good as gone,

secure in our utopic obscurity.

Your headlights, not ours, are remote, seraphic.

Eighteen wheels cry highway, highway,

the purchase they gain croons a crying lullaby.

Memory, stop crying out this nowhere highway,

tow truck, come to us soon,

memory, please end yourself again, again.

Again, again your shelter takes us in.

Memory, is this why we have glided to a stop,

so that we can relive the good return

and bear up again like a rebuilt part?

Did night have anything to do with us?

What did the truck lights and streetlights

have against the night

as they barreled into and out of us,

was darkness not acceptable to you?

On the banks of a river of metal,

river of living history and speed

we forgettings will never cross safely,

burn up our hope, cry us again—

2

with apologies

3

2018

It never was, memory, though if it never was

what a non-existence, what a clutter of glad, sad

that never was a memory per se,

that is, the concept is delusory,

we have the words and the words have us

and their echoes always ring conceptually

and time is running up and down and sideways here

and our glad pause in the Houston rain

never happened, this was a composite

of a pretty bad rain that stranded our Houston arrival in Gaylord,

and a rain that left me under an overpass in Colorado

for an entire night, and an unlikely rain that stopped us

well outside El Paso, just before Van Lord,

and our very own Houston hurricane, named after my mother, I’m sure, Alicia

that blew out a third of the windows in Emerald City

and sent rain vertically and turned our limb-bombarded streets into

a feeling that you were walking across the tops of trees

without an inkling of what then was still an untold story of unprecedented rain,

fifty-storied inches and us watching the tube, passing even past Fox

which to diminish disaster concentrated on poor people

seeming to suggest that, hell, they look homeless anyway

they may as well be homeless,

and all those post-human aerials that made earth

seem a planet of insentience

pushing its way around like, frankly, an insane president,

saying look at me, I’m bigger than you,

your city of memory is a city of nowhere,

water is everywhere as I am everywhere

saying you can’t do anything because I am the Unchosen.

And we look, mere voters, and being nobodies on the net

and liking it that way,

hate the earth at its worst as we hate the hateful,

but this was to be a poem about gladness.

I praise friends’ houses up to their teeth in push,

I praise Susan moving her car and looking out upon her whole

life on this planet,

for I can practically hear her typing an email “all this water

everywhere,”

not a word more,

and I base this vignette of Susan on personal memories of Susan,

last of us to stay on here,

and yet other unspecifiable memories of, say, the pushy inklings

that our feeling-looked-after was wondrous brief,

two people stalled inside the twentieth century

stuck gladly under one of its Apollonian marvels, a highway overpass

placed near Houston, a city I loved, like strange loves strange,

years later surprised to be worried sick over, on some general

even collectively humanized basis that had vivid personal details galore

I won’t go into,

though the feel of connection was not even remotely as unreal

as anything that comes by way of TV, including political monsters

however real, but excluding this latest flood however personally

you are able to take it.

But then I wasn’t thinking about the future.

I see just us in the old Maverick David and Lynda named Blue Thunder

after the hero, a car, of a forgettable film that can stay that way,

our first car, that convalesced ad infinitum in our days there

as students of the art of poetry,

which I believe that I am practicing

so that you can believe

if in nothing then in this spurious memory composed of impressionable slivers

of us again with a wreck of a Maverick

this time in Houston, let’s go ahead and place us, say, on US 10

just after Gaylord, maybe, as that authentically happened, so

let’s add a pair of fictive golden arches in the fictive pouring rain,

they look sincere enough to me.

And let’s call the sublime the counter-sublime

to be ornamented

with cultural markers so we can understand one another,

so as to bequeath our twentieth century and to the ear of memory

to say with fear and with any incidental courage

whatsoever

we were as two once

who didn’t think to think that all this life,

all this everywhere,

the duration of whatever we are,

was beyond us.