by Adam Sol
in an instant.
I must hurry to speak before the paneling becomes my bones
and the wallpaper my skin.
Hear, my people!
Abandon your fantasy leagues and your bogus committees!
The end of our championship run draws nigh,
and no smiling governor can veto the decree.
OHIO PORTRAIT IN 5-SYLLABLE ROAD SIGNS
Woodchipper for Rent
Danger! Rocks Below!
Registered Holsteins
Adopt a Highway
Pres. Harding’s Birthplace
Progressive Euchre
Troubled? Try Praying.
Soccer Conference Champs
Long Live Rock & Roll
Ceramic Lawn Pets
New Development
Re-elect John Glenn
The County’s Best Yarn
Slippery When Wet
Sarah We Miss You
Hardy Mums for Sale
Private Property
Forget the Damned Dog —
Beware of Owner!
Electric Co-Op
Next Stop Defiance
Wal-Mart Coming Soon
RIGHT LANE MUST EXIT
In Canton I bought a carton of Camels
to show I was prepared to die. Here, orange
smoke over the flavor factory reminds me
of safer houses. Pigeon scat streaks the overpass
as these words stain my chin.
Where have you been, o my comforter?
Who knows me better
than you in your wet wool sweater?
For a while I fancied myself a paper crane —
I was intricate and prone to luck. Now even
my arches are fallen. What I have seen
in my once-proud towns
could turn a brick brittle. Look —
the Ohio hills have gone blue like a cold lip.
The boys I loved
have collapsed themselves in shame. They see now
how they profited from prophets. Yea,
I could tell tall tales about our fancy wagons and smacked chins.
I could belly up and bend dimes for spite.
But no —
I’ll keep to this frantic caravan.
So long as my alternator holds,
I will blitz borders with the best.
Workmanlike, I shift and scan.
ELEGY FOR THE TRUCK
We were just
hitting the outskirts of Ashland —
the dead smokestacks, the cheerful billboards —
when the truck
coughed, clanged, and started weaving right.
I eased her to the highway’s shoulder
and started
cursing the day I was born, but
Jeremiah stopped me with a laugh.
He climbed out
and stroked the hood, head bent, as if
he were listening for a voice from
the fan belt.
A minute later he hefted
his duffel bag and started walking.
I asked him
if he had any damned idea
how far we would be going tonight.
He answered,
“We were without transportation
at the beginnings of our journeys,
and we must
always be prepared to hoof it.
This steed has carried us far enough.”
I was still
thinking about the dispatcher
in Circleville who’d want fourteen grand
once I was
back home after all this madness.
Then it struck me that I might never,
that I might
just keep going. How long could I
follow this man? How much would I change?
Before we
lumbered down the next exit ramp
I took a last look back at the truck.
How long would
it take for the local bandits
to strip it down to bolts and trinkets?
And is that
some kind of weird resurrection?
What would Jeremiah say to that?
ASHLAND RADIO
There he was just walking down the street, singing.
Good day. Sunshine. Then he goes raising the roof.
Crashes into me wearing that same old shaggy dress.
I’m thinking, What’s it all about?
He wants to hold my hand. He’s funny that way.
I’m like, You’d better watch your step. You’ll be a woman soon.
He shouts. Lets it all out. I know now.
It’s your destiny to be the king of pain. So? Here we are.
Now entertain us. He started talking at me, Get up! Stand up!
It don’t mean nothing. Not this time.
If you want to sing out, I’m your man. Roam if you want to.
But nothing’s gonna change my world.
He can’t hold back. Falls into a burning ring of fire,
calling out around the world.
Something in my heart keeps telling me, don’t talk back.
But enough is enough. Can’t stand no more.
I hit him with my best shot. Whoomp, there it is.
His eyes too bloody to see.
I could have danced all night, but Jane says,
Don’t be cruel. Take me to the river.
AFTERMATH
I went out and bought a bag of carrots,
something good he could eat without his hands,
which were swollen, raw, and shiny with lymph.
I popped them in his mouth two at a time
while we worked our way back to the highway.
I said, “Listen, there are some people that,
no matter how you say it, no matter
how brave and beautiful your imagery,
they will never believe in you. Ever.
They will never turn.” “If you believe that,”
he said, turning, stopping dead in his tracks,
and holding out his puffy hands like two
oven mitts to protect him from my heat —
“If you think that then you are a traitor
and a scoundrel, a damned carpet-bagger
and a mountebank. What are you here for
if not to change the hearts of the people —
all the people, every one. Some with words,
some with images, some by force of will,
some because of what they hear from others,
others because of what they think they hear.
Everyone must change or no one will be saved.”
WAKING AND HEARING THE CALL OF THE CITY
I woke from my dream of Lodi
and started on my journey.
It was just after sunrise. Small birds with big voices were screeching in the little splotch of trees where we were sleeping next to the highway. He sat up with a cough and began combing his fingers through his beard, looking for ticks. I stoked coals to boil our two eggs in the can of beans we ate last night. All gifts of a legal secretary he terrified at lunch hour with words of warning:
Behold I set before you the ways of life and death —
Only by falling away can you live.
He chewed the egg without peeling it, then drank the water out of the can, not even wincing at the hot metal on his mouth, though a welt grew on his bottom lip that I had to salt to keep from bursting.
Bruce, you are a pillar in a garden of cucumbers.
Thanks. He must still be half asleep. I gathered my pack and a couple of walking sticks, and we hopped the fence back to the shoulder. Where to today, Quien no sabe?
To the city of iniquity, where parking meters
brutalize the passersby,
and street signs enforce the day. One way! One way!
What are you saying, I asked him. We haven’t seen a one-way street since we fled Columbus. Where to now, Cleveland?
It shall be a dwelling place for jackals,
an astonishment and a hissing.
The people will moan like pipes.
Sounds like Cleveland to me.
SLOPPING IN THE RAIN BETWEEN WADSWORTH AND POE
Yea, in the city I will speak the truth!
Hey ho, the truth in the place of iniquity!
I will warn the people in their linen hearts,
I will tell them to turn, turn, turn.
What more can I do but harangue when the sky
hangs precarious
like a vase on a lawn mower.
How can they fail to hear me,
when they know
I speak straight from the Source?
Their cellphones are magnets pulling,
pulling them to another blank signal.
The people are lost without their wonder.
They fuss and fret
but have no fury.
Yea, I was sitting amidst the wrenches and petunias
when the voice of the Lord
came ringing down
like a gameshow winner’s fanfare. It said,
Who will seize my country with conviction?
Who will lead us into a new season?
Yo! I said. I’m your man. Send me.
But you are tarnished and despoiled,
sad fool.
You could not even care for a boy.
How can you save the whole people?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
AKRON’S HISTORY IS COLORFUL, PAINFUL, DIVERSE, AND INSPIRING
Some mornings he would wake me
by declaiming while he pissed,
but others, I’d blink awake
to find he’d cleared the campsite
and washed my clothes, hanging them
on convenient pine branches.
He’d wait till I was fully
alert, then he’d say, “Come now,”
and we’d be at it again.
Before, I’d thought about how
this trip was helping me find
a tolerable version
of the self I thought I’d lost.
But it was only after
that awful night in Ashland —
nursing him, calming him down —
that I started to believe
that I was meant to be here.
A little sympathy,
a little frustration and luck
and all of a sudden
you find yourself at the center
of something that becomes
who you are for a while. Not quite
an accident. More like
a mistake you were prepared for.
BULLFROG JEREMIAH
In a distant lake before my boy was born
I sank to my hips in mud
and croaked an old song to the new reeds.
Where were my thrilled companions?
Behold they were scattered like beans in a pot,
carapaces cracking.
You couldn’t lob a grenade without hitting one,
and so I did, rejoicing.
Yea, their cries of glory reached the heavens,
but hardly broke the surface of the water
where spray and stone intermingled.
Lord forgive me,
I thought I had learned about grief in those waters,
but I sit corrected.
Now I wait in Columbiana sludge with a bone in my back
and Bruce gone to town for cabbage.
What ho, mosquitoes! Wherefore your biblical anger
and insistence?
How can I absolve you when my blood has been drained
like a spidered fly?
Why not follow me east and feast on the entrails of the cityfolk
instead of on an old man whose will is so blunt
he can’t chew through stew?
JEREMIAH’S WOUNDS
First the heart, clogged crushed and clattered like a bus stop can of pop.
Then the creaky joints, as if he had been drained of fluids.
Various unmentionable digestive complaints.
Blackberry bush scratches on calves, cheeks, and forearms.
Broken tooth from cut-rate barber in Dry Fork.
Scraped up hands from misfired roundhouse in Pink.
Athlete’s foot between fourth and fifth toes.
Sprained knee: wrong-end off-ramp tumble.
Cavity right bicuspid.
Bleeding ear from thrown stone.
Old wrenched wrestling hip.
Tree root stiff neck.
Blistered lip.
Fallen arch.
Hayfever.
Sunburn.
Shingles.
Piles.
Corns.
JEREMIAH AT THE ALL SAINTS CATHEDRAL, YOUNGSTOWN
I embrace your iconography with its gold paint
and its tragic majesty.
I genuflect before the symbols of super-human suffering,
while I suffer as a human,
the only way I know how.
Surely you must see that your families
are breaking apart like spring ice.
The heat comes from the east —
we must douse it with our good deeds,
or it will crisp us like over-grilled cheese.
We must cleanse the city of its corruption manacles,
its sadness and its fastfood chains.
We must let loose the Hun, and the drum, and the One.
Behold I must speak with the king!
I must speak to the man who speaks like a king,
and the man who speaks like a chipmunk.
I must convince them all to purge, to turn,
to don this shirt of fine hair
and bore me with their righteousness.
Only then will I have performed my service.
Only then will my boy rest.
Have we not earned our mistreatment?
Have we not shimmied and chastised and bowled?
Have there not been city council meetings and testimony
that all should have attended
but instead we were found lolling in lounge chairs
or shopping for socks?
Engage, o my people! Be onerous and phrenetic!
Be vicious with your systems!
Who knows but that your world will shake
with the slip of an axle,
and your well-rehearsed unfeeling gloom
suddenly burst claws of fire?
Will you tally yourselves among those
who cared for rebel lieutenants?
Will you take your place with those
who stripped off their suits for a swim?
JEREMIAH PLAYS CHESS
J bowls through thicket and yon cursing sturdy billboard construction, hair knotted up with last year’s fallen oak bark. Comes down on college town sweating lustily in the post-exam heat and greet. Tank top and cut-off summer school not half bad if you don’t have to wrack your head against Org. J flusters into the Snazzy Café proclaiming: Cut off the foreskins of your hearts! Lounging crowd is, like, Word. Nod wink and grin at hapless barkeep thinking, Always on my watch. Then smart-mouth part-time landscaper-artist sidles forward with a new song: play? J flickers, feints, forks rook with nifty knightmoves. Landscaper doesn’t get the joke. J vaguely victorious until drops sight of crucial bishop to proclaim a moratorium on bug zappers. Endgame. Landscaper won’t accept his assignation. Launches into various hoots and proofs. Don’t play dumb, bum. J knocks a coffee overboard while waving a despondent arm. Latte on lapel of grad stud reading Hobbes at next table. J gets ugly tossed. Skins an elbow and limps to campus nursing. Stashes sack in all-night computer lab and wanders halls in mad lament till good-natured Ralph Duck sends him on his way. Back to the highway withya, hobo. J says, Word.
WHAT I’VE GOT SO FAR, APPROACHING YOUNGSTOWN AND SEPTEMBER
Buses are beautiful
but billboards an abomination.
Highways lead to the circle of truth.
Walking is like sleeping because it contains waves and rhythms.
In the Jeremiah mind, Ohio is the desert.
Five miles outside of Ashland on Mud Lake Jeremiah found a fish floating belly-up to the sun and thought it was worshipping. Perhaps a carp, but probably stock bass or rockfish. In the Jeremiah mind all things are searching for a way to sing to the heavens, and dying in the shallow water is no less a way than shouting at the passers-by on Route 250. Later we walked into a pizza joint called Brothers where locals sourly dripped sauce onto their Plain Dealer and he said,
Woe is the man who has lost his sense of taste.
Woe is the woman who eats and finds no comfort.
Being run out of town is not the same thing as being ignored.
In Jeremiah’s mind the savage will win out on the street, but at night in their beds the people will begin to listen.
Once he said that eating gravel is an ancient form of holy speech.
In Jeremiah’s mind we strayed from the path when we stopped stopping each other on the way to the grocery.
The silence as much as the hurry, the air conditioning and power windows, the drive-thru and the cellphone.
In his mind teenagers with headphones are an exception because even in their silence they speak to each other of their fear and loneliness.
To Jeremiah, there are those given righteousness, and those given other gifts, like football.
Nowhere, in anything he’s said, is there a hint that what he has done, and what he is doing, and what he might do, is not part of a plan to bring the people back to each other. His trust is perfect, though he knows he will likely not witness the day. He is on point and will see action, but only the rear-guard will finish the victory.
