Quoting Robert Burns

Quoting Robert Burns

It began with the woman in the commercial:

she had dirty socks

her boy had played baseball-

in-the-mud

as all AMERICAN boys do...

We had turned the set on

leaving the room to do our other business and

leaving it to its covertly explicit ramblings, when

suddenly childlike, percipient...

she began quoting Burns without a brogue like making

faces in the car on the highway

without adjusting the rearview mirror

to see them anymore:

doing the thing just to do it

not to keep sane on a long trip or

to try out different smiles

to use in public or to sell

detergent.

Of course I was not there,

otherwise it would have been tainted

as all commercials are having more to do with

the fat man in the biggest office

than with clean socks or

AMERICAN boys who, of course, play baseball-in-

the-mud.

*****

It was night

over the rows of dry cornstalk arms

(broken into elbows just above the surface)

snow was the promise for that night

and my truck whined down the highway

either side black as the

edge of a mattress

until

a glowing green house emerged orange in

the starboard vastness of dead fields... Life

was there:

roses, mums, zinnias, tulips

perhaps even strawberries or beans

In the darkness, the elbows

shuddered beneath the first flakes.

As I turned off the radio,

I believe my face glowed dimly in the mirror by the

dashboard lights...

Life was there.

The snow came secretly, later that night rendering

the stalk-arms overtly implicit

within the whiteness:

symbol of the housewife

with a million dirty socks

and no more commercial

to let her know,

quoting Burns without a brogue,

giving up on the impossible purity of snow

in anything too ulterior--- too

prepared.

But no one heard the woman or the

stalk's movement.

I make my faces alone

without even the eye of the mirror,

quoting Burns just because it's Burns.