About his poems, Bob Bradshaw writes:
"Certainly Thomas Hart Benton's painting "Susanna And The Elders" was my most compelling reason for visiting the de Young Museum for years. So it didn't surprise me when I wrote a couple poems around Mr. Hart's painting. Of course my poems are a botched homage. But that's to be expected.
I'm reminded of an old cartoon in The New Yorker where a painter flings a bucket of paint onto a canvas, and an image of the Mona Lisa appears.
We would all like our poetry to be that simple. And we're lured into thinking it's possible because there is so much compelling art, and often it appears to have been created effortlessly. Mr. Benton's paintings have this feel to them, anyway."
Bob Bradshaw's poetry also appears in the 1998, 1999, and 2000 editions of The Central California Poetry Journal on: page 8114, page 9116, and page 0010.
We've come to pay respects
to Wyatt Earp.
It's eerie.
I half-expect to see his boots
sticking up
through the grass.
He lies sprawled somewhere
in the dust
like any man thrown
from his horse.
It's like an L.A. Tour
of the homes of the rich
and famous.
We check our map.
Someone says Fatty Arbuckle's
retired here.
"No, that's not true,"
Fannie says. "But Wyatt's
here, buried with his polished
pistols."
We study our map, as excited
as scavenger hunters.
"That way," Fannie points.
"Everyone
who was anyone is buried here,"
Fannie says. "Mayors,
ambassadors, madams
of brothels,
Hell's Angels. Harry
'The Horse' Flamburis is here."
Who?
"Hell's Angel. Buried here
with his Harley Davidson."
Yeah, right. "No,
really!"
He's stalled in traffic
like everyone else,
I say. What makes him
different?
Fannie stares at me,
her eyes staring at me
the way the barrels
of Wyatt Earp's famous pistols
were drawn
at the OK Corral.
Ok, ok,
I say. Whatever.
"It's history!,"
she says, like a paparazzi
justifying her career
of digging up dirt
on everyone.
You're right, I say,
to calm her. So,
where's this Wyatt
guy?
Fannie says, like a cop
giving a warning
to someone she's pulled over,
"Don't joke about everything.
Some things
are sacred. He's famous.
He killed people."
I nod.
"Oh, that way!" she shouts.
She's found it.
"This is it," she says
her voice hushed,
reverent. "Wyatt's
grave."
I look around.
I half-expect to see
a tombstone the size of a barn.
Where? That's
it?
There's no bronze statue
of a saddle. Nothing.
It's a simple slab.
"Shhhh," she says.
"Wyatt's buried here."
What did you expect?
An impostor?
She doesn't hear me.
"Ok,
we can check Wyatt off.
Now look for Emperor Norton's grave
on the map."
Wasn't he a cartoon figure?
"Oh no," she says.
"He's here.
He's over there," she says
and off she trots,
her heels leaving divots
in grass as well-trimmed
as Augusta's.
So,
I ask, who was this Norton
guy? "The Great Emperor Of North America",
"the Defender of Mexico",
"the..." Yeah,
right, I say.
"History,"
she repeats. "He's part
of history!" Yeah,
right, I say.
History.
"That's why we're here.
Don't you respect
anything?" The Three
Stooges, I answer.
Are they buried
here?
"Don't you want to be buried here?"
she asks incredulously.
What? It's like a big
fraternity
of the dead. Why wouldn't
I want to be housed
here?
She dismisses my sarcasm.
"You're hopeless,"
she says. "You'll be lucky
to be let into the Pet
Cemetery."
I can see, in the distance, a backhoe
stalled next
to a half-dug grave.
It doesn't matter,
I think.
But Fannie's off, racing
through another suburb
of graves,
their small hills
all lined up
like road bumps.
Slow down, I yell,
exhausted from the day's search.
You're killing
me.
Today is Janis Joplin's birthday.
A record circles behind me.
The scratchy groove thickens
like a voice thick with liquor.
Janis was a survivor of self-
doubt. There's the story of her rolling
empty whiskey bottles
down a San Francisco hill.
Dreams for Janis
were like empty bottles. She
carefully set them up,
and carelessly knocked them down.
She was unsteady on her feet.
She was going down.
But she sensed it. We didn't.
For us the times ahead
were like term papers;
we could put them off,
not think about them for weeks.
But Janis doubted herself. We
were cocky. We'd find good jobs,
win various Nobel prizes,
stop the war. We just wouldn't
do it overnight. We could wait.
We never said it but we knew
underneath that we'd live forever.
But thirty years later
Janis wails behind me on an old '45.
Behind her, a drumbeat that's a worn out heart
jumping with adrenalin.
The pain in her voice thickens.
My son asks, Who's that?
his voice disdainful. "Janis.
Janis Joplin." Whoever,
he says.
You stumble on this painting
in a badly lit corner of the de Young.
In it a river with its big hips
lounges behind the old men
who gawk, as you do,
as if they'd walked out to a field
freshly plowed under by a meteorite.
Something foreign has entered
their lives,
from beyond the next county.
Their universe had always been
the dirt they'd scrubbed
from their backs,
the colors earthen
and unremarkable, like shards of clay
pottery. Their wives burdened
with bulges
like potatoes'. Their wives' dresses
carry stains
under the armpits. Not women
you would have followed by private
eyes.
Each knows their neighbor's past
as well as they know
their neighbor's worth in pigs and heifers.
But there Suzanna is, naked,
her body curved like the river's,
her long red hair
draped across her shoulder,
brazenly following her cleavage.
You stare at her beauty
like the first time you saw red foliage
in the fall, as if a black and white photo
had suddenly bloomed
into color.
They, too, gawk.
Hadn't
the world always been lines
like corn rows and irrigation pipes?
Now the hills, like a
harem lounging on their sides,
were boasting curves.
But already the old men can see their wives
clumping towards them,
yelling,
as outraged as if someone had let a cow
into the house.
But they're far enough away
for the old men to feign deafness.
We saw our husbands ogling her
Our yelling Sara said was like
from a distance,
as if gawking at a hot-air balloon
that's landed in an empty field.
We came running up the hill,
our lungs burning.
What were the fools thinking?
Sarah swore. They're as lecherous
as field mice, she said.
The girl, naked as a broom handle,
was propped against a tree.
waving a rifle at a blind
snake. Was this the way they saw
women? We were outraged.
Although we'd always had our
suspicions.
I knew what Sara was thinking.
We had our daughters'
and granddaughters' futures
to protect. Anyway the old fools
couldn't lead the lives of boys
at a State Fair.
They had responsibilities.
Each was like a snake
in cool grass.
I wasn't worried. You just needed
to kick a stunned snake
to get it moving
again. Sarah ran up
to her husband and nudged him
with her boot. What are you staring at?
she demanded. Trespasser,
he mumbled. She yanked his arm.
I ran up. Throw a coat
over that girl, I yelled.
It hit me, had she been raped?
Why
was she leaning naked
against that twisted
tree? She was pale, like milkweed.
I shooed the men home.
They had the look of boys
who've chased the cows crazy
and know they're gonna be punished
but figure the fun
was worth
it.
Why is it that girls grow up into women
but boys grow up into oversized
boys? Didn't it occur to them
the stranger might need
help?
No, lechery was a head
on a two-headed snake.
It had tried to pull each of them in one
direction. But wasn't dominant
enough to lead.
As teenage boys they'd have been pulled
one way. As men they
froze. But they might have been nudged
easily another way if we'd
not showed
up.
My only child, an infant, died.
So I consulted a fortuneteller.
Keep building, she said,
The hammers have stuttered for thirty years.
Stairways climb like unfinished prayers.
But the clatter
I only wanted a normal life.
Can you imagine the dread
But I fear them turning on me.
Several years later my dear husband,
with bum lungs, died.
My life was empty.
I was like a bucket
with its bottom knocked out,
helpless to change
my fate.
if you want to live.
Or the dead, victims of the Winchester rifle,
will surround you
like vigilantes.
The mothers of dead children
will not forget
even though they, too,
wander the dusky corridors of death.
Is it my fault? I sobbed.
But the fortuneteller showed no pity.
So I moved West, to San Jose, and bought a plot of land
and started construction
on a small house.
40 bedrooms, 12 guest rooms.
Unfinished ballrooms.
There are windows near your feet that open
onto floors an inch
below.
And there are corridors that wander like the weak-minded
trapped in a house of mirrors.
A strategy to confuse and mislead
those dreadful spirits.
To keep them from harming me.
of hammers and nails
is like wagons rattling
all day across cobblestone streets:
it unsettles me.
of being surrounded by those
poor, haunted mothers?
The sadness in the air...
I hear them weeping in the early hours,
and there isn't anything
that I can do to console them.
That is why there are doors
that open onto brick walls,
closets that, like a doll's house,
are an inch deep,
and orphaned hallways.
But at times they still find me:
It isn't my fault, I sob.
What
would you do? I keep asking them,
if you were me, what
would you
do?
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway2001. All rights are reserved. See main Journal page for copyright information.
Authors and poets submitting original materials to this journal retain all rights to their original work, except those rights specifically assigned in writing to Solo Publications including the right to publish the submitted work in The Central California Poetry Journal. The poems on this page are copyrighted by the author. Copyright © Bob Bradshaw
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