Today’s show once again features David Mason, distinguished poet, professor and former Poet Laureate (2010-2014) of Colorado. His books include Ludlow: a Verse Novel; The Country I Remember; Arrivals; News from the Village; The Scarlet Libretto; Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade, 2004-2014; and Davey McGravy: Tales to be Read Aloud to Children and Adult Children.This is his wonderful and innovative poem, “Spooning”:
After my grandfather died I went back
to help my mother sell his furniture:
the old chair he did his sitting on,
the kitchen things. Going through his boxes
I found letters, cancelled checks, the usual
old photographs of relatives I hardly knew
and Grandmother, clutching an apron in both hands.
And her. There was an old publicity still
taken when she wore her hair like a helmet,
polished black. Posed before a cardboard shell
and painted waves, she seemed unattainable,
as she was meant to.
For years we thought he lied
about his knowing her when he was young,
but Grandfather was a man who hated liars,
a man who worshipped all the tarnished virtues,
went daily to his shop at eight, until
the first of three strokes forced him to retire.
He liked talking. Somebody had to listen,
so I was the listener for hours after school
until my parents called me home to supper.
We’d sit on his glassed-in porch where he kept a box
of apples wrapped in newsprint.
He told me about the time he lost a job
at the mill. Nooksack seemed to kill its young
with boredom even then, but he owned a car,
a ’24 Ford. He drove it east to see
America, got as far as Spokane’s desert,
sold the car and worked back on the railroad.
Sometimes he asked me what I liked to do.
I told him about the drive-in movies where
my brother, Billy, took me if I paid.
In small towns movies are the only place to go.
Not Grandfather. He said they made them better when
nobody talked, and faces told it all.
“I knew Lydia Truman Gates,” he said,
“back when she was plain old Lydia Carter
down on Water Street. One time her old man
caught us spooning out to the railroad tracks.
Nearly tanned my hide. He was a fisherman—
that is, till she moved her folks to Hollywood.”
I don’t know why, but I simply couldn’t ask
what spooning was. He seemed to talk then
more to his chair’s abrasions on the floor,
more to thee pale alders outside his window.
The way he said her name I couldn’t ask
who was Lydia Truman Gates.
*
“Nonsense,”
was all my mother said at dinner. “His mind
went haywire in the hospital. He’s old.
He makes things up and can’t tell the difference.”
I think my father’s smile embarrassed her
when he said, “The poor guy’s disappointed.
Nothing ever went right for him, so he daydreams.”
“Nonsense,” my mother said. “And anyway
no Lydia Truman Gates ever came
from a town like this.”
“It’s not so bad a place.
I make a pretty decent living here.”
My mother huffed. While I stared past my plate
Billy asked, “Who is Lydia Truman Gates?”
*
It wasn’t long before we all found out.
The paper ran a story on her. How
she was famous in the twenties for a while,
married the old billionaire, Gates, and retired.
She was coming back home to Nooksack. The mayor
would give a big award and ask her help
to renovate our landmark theater.
We had better things, our mother said, to spend
our money on than some old movie house,
though she remembered how it used to look.
She said that people living in the past
wouldn’t amount to much.
We didn’t tell our parents where we went
that night, riding our bikes in a warm wind
past the fish houses on the Puget Sound
and up Grant Street to the Hiawatha.
Inside, Billy held my hand, and showed me
faded paintings of Indians on the walls
and dark forest patterns in the worn carpet.
The place smelled stale like old decaying clothes
shut up in a trunk for twenty years,
but Nooksack’s best were there, some in tuxes,
and women stuffed into their evening gowns.
We sat on the balcony looking down
on bald heads, high hairdos and jewels.
Near the stage they had a twenty-piece band—
I still remember when the lights went out
the violins rose like a flock of birds
all at once. The drums sounded a shudder.
We saw Morocco Gold, The Outlaw, Colonel Clay
and the comic short, A Bird in the Hand,
flickering down to the screen
where Lydia Truman Gates arose in veils,
in something gossamer
astonishing even in 1965.
Lydia Truman Gates was like a dream
of lithe attention, her dark eyes laughing
at death, at poverty or a satin bed.
And when they brought her on the stage, applause
rising and falling like a tidal wave,
I had to stand up on my seat to see
a frail old woman, assisted by two men,
tiny on that distant stage.
My brother
Yanked me past what seemed like a hundred pairs
of knees for all the times I said “Excuse us.”
We ran out where the chauffeur
waiting by her limousine, his face painted
green by the light from Heilman’s Piano Store,
breathing smoke. “You guys keep your distance.”
“Is she coming out?”
He crushed his cigarette:
“No, she’s gonna die in there. What do you think?”
More people joined us, pacing in the alley,
watching the chauffeur smoke by the door propped
open with a cinderblock.
And then the door half-opened, sighed back,
opened at last on the forearm of a man.
Behind him, Lydia Truman Gates stepped out
with her cane—hardly the women I had seen
enduring all the problems of the world
with such aplomb. She stared down at the pavement,
saying, “Thank you, I can see it clearly now.”
“Mrs. Gates,” Billy stuttered, “Mrs. Gates.”
The chauffeur tried to block us, but she said,
“That’s all right, Andrew. They’re just kids. I’m safe.”
“Our grandpa says hello,” I blurted out.
She paused for half a beat, glanced at Billy,
then peered at me as if to study terror,
smiling. “Well I’ll be damned. And who’s he?”
“Don’t listen to him,” Billy said. “He’s nuts.”
“George McCracken,” I said, “the one you spooned with
down to the railroad tracks.”
“George McCracken.”
She straightened, looked up at the strip of sky.
“Spooned. Well, that’s one way to talk about it.”
She laughed from deep down in her husky lungs.
“Old Georgie McCracken. Is he still alive?
Too scared to come downtown and say hello?”
She reached out from her furs and touched my hair.
“Thanks for the message, little man. I knew him.
I knew he’d never get out of this town.
You tell your Grandpa Hi from Liddy Carter.”
The man at her elbow said they had to leave.
She nodded, handing her award and purse
to the fat chauffeur.
Then flashbulbs started popping.
I saw her face lit up, then pale and caving
back into the darkness. “Christ,” she whispered,
“get me out of here.”
I stumbled, or was pushed.
My eyes kept seeing her exploding at me,
a woman made entirely of light
beside the smaller figure who was real.
Two men tipped her into the limousine
and it slid off like a shark, parting the crowd.
*
A picture ran in the next day’s Herald—
the great actress touches a local boy.
For two weeks everybody talked about me,
but I kept thinking, Is he still alive?
Too scared to come downtown and say hello?
I thought of her decaying on a screen,
her ribs folding like a silk umbrella’s rods,
while all the men who gathered around her
clutched at the remnants of her empty dress.
…
The persistence of iambic pentameter in this poem is perhaps akin to the persistence of the “old” form of film—“astonishing even in 1965.” And I don’t know of a better description of a movie star than “a woman made entirely of light.”
Part Two of Two.