Some Things I Would Like to Forget about America
By Paul Guest
Include the fact of Ronald Reagan, that he had a birthday,
that so many of us wandering around, loosed
like starving beasts, were glad of him and his starchy life,
when I felt a brief pang of sadness for him
when his disease had progressed so far
it was no longer safe to sit a horse like a country lord
and a secret service agent, one that had been with him a long time,
was the one to tell him no, those days
were over. Goddamn him. I felt that.
I imagine the day was hot,
good, pleasant, free of the constant apocalyptic miasma
that defines all the time now; is in the water,
must be, like runoff from Something Horrible
in West Virginia, a state which is achingly lovely,
and terrifying, how the mountainsides run down
into the woe-begotten parking lots of fast food places
one stops at only because inside there are
grim restrooms. Twenty years ago
I was failing at so much: my first real work,
which was alarming for all the time
it gobbled up like a monster
and the little good it did anyone, anywhere;
I was failing at love, then,
and the young woman who drove from Alabama, there.
I think I’d like to forget, if
this poem is about what’s wishful,
my arms: how they’ve not worked in thirty-six years,
and are, mostly, the sad loci of pain and stupid dreams
and alternate histories. I think of the kid
I went to high school with,
whose pitching arm was strong and rare
and worth millions of dollars;
how he was scouted by old men who all said to him,
we can change your life,
if you sign this contract,
if you ignore your mother’s edict you get your education first.
I need tell nobody he lost it all
the following year due to a common injury
and now our lifetime earning potentials aren’t so far apart.
I once taught where Newt Gingrich
first appeared to the world like a pale warning.
There was a plaque in the hallway
so that no one would ever forget
he lectured the young on the cyclical evils of history.
How there was always fire
wherever there was death
and the world was pretty much immune to so much suffering.
That sounds pretty good, I think,
as if somewhere, anywhere,
at least the potential for quiet is there.
It exists. The way large sums live in the smoke-sour air
of finance and mathematics
and clever suppositions about event horizons.
What the invisible looks like.
How our bodies flatten and stretch,
infinitely, a parlor trick on the edge of everything,
where no guarantee exists
of pleasure, of course. Just weeping, I bet.
I wish I could sing. I wish I were capable of such beauty:
blank and limitless and shocking,
dependent only upon the air.
I want to forget myself. My place. My manners for a night.
To just barge in, not to applause,
that’s silly, too much, the stuff of screwball comedies
starring Cary Grant. My name: let me not recall
who I have come here to be.
