9/18/2017 0 Comments Poetry By Gale AcuffGood Boy At three o'clock in the morning I check my email. I hear from three editors that I can't write well enough to please them. They're right. I can't please myself, either is why I keep at it. Oh, I please for a while; then I try again. All my poems sound the same, they say. That's monotony --the poor man's consistency, the desperate writer's of-a-kind-ness. What's next for me is me again, with a trace of growth if only some age. I teach in China now so I can learn my own language again. There are about a billion-and-a-half people, so I can concentrate. A lot of poverty--I'm blessed. Relatively, that is. No one needs me in my country --here I'm valuable just because I live and speak the international language of business . . . until the West collapses and Asia rules the world again. I know what I'm not doing--I've written this poem over a thousand blooming times. It's not the same but it is and while that's not art that's life. No wonder they can't shut me up. Third Eye In Sunday School today Miss Hooker said that God is everywhere. I raised my hand and asked, So why can't I see Him? She smiled and told me that I see Him all the time but only with my eyes and not my heart. I asked her how to see Him with my heart and she said that I must pray every night and then I will, maybe not right away but eventually. I think that means sooner or later, most likely later but not too much later. I'm ten years old so to me not too much later means when I'm old but not old enough to die naturally, say 80 or 90, but probably 40 or 50--I figured that out, not Miss Hooker, so I must be getting smarter. And that's if I don't die of something other than old age, cancer maybe, or a heart attack, or getting smashed by a car on my way home from church next week or on my way to, I walk the mile there, and back again of course, and against the flow of traffic--I'll know what hit me that way, will see it coming, death grinning like a Fairlane or Bel Air or Belvedere or even a Cadillac, all those cars with chrome teeth between their eyeball-headlights, sometimes four. I'd rather be killed by an XKE but there aren't any rich folks around here so I doubt I'll ever be that lucky except through the kindness of a stranger. If I die a sinner I'll go to Hell forever, which is a mighty long time and it's only 1965. But I'll never sin again, or not as much, if I pray a lot like Miss Hooker says and if she's right I'll see God everywhere so I'll be safe. Then when I die I'll go to Heaven and live with the angels and my dead dog. Man, will it be good to see him again, I've missed him, he was a good boy and when I found him run over he was like a helpless puppy again but dead. So I pried him off the road, dried blood is like glue between fur and blacktop, and I had to hurry or get run over myself although I guess a car would've honked at me to get out of the way, slowed down maybe, and some Good Samaritan would've stopped to help me but it never came to that. I got Caesar off the road and into the wheelbarrow and rolled him (and me, too, I guess--at least I followed) up our dirt driveway and around the shack and into the back yard and down into the garden, beans and corn on one side and flowers on the other, then onto the last terrace where our property ends at the fence by the Baptist Church where I don't attend, we're Methodists, who knows why, I just go where my folks tell me though they don't go themselves, they stay home and sleep late on Sunday mornings, and I wonder if they see God like Miss Hooker does, with that third eye, the one in the heart, I mean. Then I buried him, all by myself, and me just eight years old then. And when they asked me later, Son, where's your dog, I told them He's in the ground and up in Heaven now, then told them his story, how I found him on the highway when I went out to fetch the Sunday paper from the shoulder. Oh, Father said. Well, Mother said. Then they had another cigarette and more Sanka. After supper we had apple pie with cheese, my favorite dessert--Death's not so bad. I think maybe I saw God in the hole and covered Him with dirt and walked away and the grass grew and smoothed Him over and I can't find where He is to dig Him up again. Just to see what He looks like now. Childish Things I'm singing some Van Morrison song in her father's shower. He's gone for three days to the Carolina coast, for fishing, and so that he can slip off to rendezvous with one of his girlfriends. I met the man a few days ago--he's no handsomer than I but he has several women, so his youngest daughter, my main squeeze, tells me. My revenge is she--one of my students, who came often to my office to ask why D.H. Lawrence short-stories are so sexy. Next thing I know I'm licking her finger melting frozen yogurt, across the street by the XXX cinema which shows mainly Disney films these days. I call her my little mermaid--they look much alike. Yes, but our tails are different. I'm pretty lonely so I forget that caveat about teachers and students not dating, and that crap about abuse of authority and power relations. I can't help myself. Once or twice a week I visit her. We step out for supper or she prepares it for us. On a full belly I get awfully affectionate sometimes. And, besides, her favorite TV show is thirtysomething--I'm thirty-three to her twenty-two and that's romantic. We'll be sitting in the S & W Diner, which we rename the S & M, and some geezer will limp up to our table and say something to signify he knows what we'll be up to that evening. Right on:I shoot that I-won-the-Lottery look and he flashes that If-you've-got-sex -and-love-together-you've-really-got-it- all smile. I do and I have. He leaves. She says to me, He's a dirty old man. I say, No, he wants to be me. She titters. It's been about two years since my divorce and I'm saying things like You know, I've had more pleasure with you in just six weeks than I had with her in nearly four years. Truthful bull like that. A few days later we visit her hometown--Fayetteville, North Carolina. A lot of soldiers there. Fayette Nam, some call it. Or Fatal-ville. Eight cats in her home. Photographs as you climb the hall stairs to her old bedroom. It's still full of childhood touchstones. Tot's rocker. Fat-faced minimal Ziggy posters. A Loverboy calendar. A hanging which announces, When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. And I don't want to have sex with her here but we do. She teases and coaxes me out of me again--it doesn't take a lot of persuasion--and when I wake next day she shows me the master bedroom and I wash each other's dried desire from me while I sing a medley, badly, of Van's songs. I even use her father's aftershave, which I don't like but she does, and as she's scrambling eggs for breakfast I see it all at once and I can't swallow. Honey, what's wrong? she asks. And I say, Nothing, nothing, and that's the truth, that what's bothering me is that everything is as it should be. You've changed my life, I tell her. I've said so before but not with the thrust it has now, which is the whole truth and nothing but. I smoke and think, Has she known it all along? but I don't ask her--I might frighten her and I'm already terrified. I drive her father's new Chrysler to the grocery. When we return she poaches sea-bass for our supper. We watch a film, go upstairs to her room, which is also my room. I work off my disbelief inside her. You're so sexy, she whispers. You're a great man. Yes, I say. You're right. I believe in you. Bio: Gale Acuff's poems have been published in Ascent, Coe Review, McNeese Review, Adirondack Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, Maryland Poetry Review, FloridaReview, South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, Arkansas Review, Poem, South Dakota Review, and many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008). He has taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.
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