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AUGUSTINE CONFESSION
by J. Alan Nelson Some of my most vivid memories connect to television shows. My mother watches As the World Turns until Kennedy is shot which interrupts the show. She won't watch that show again, and worries about the Kennedy family whenever she saw a soap opera. Now long dead, her fretful voice haunts me with anxiety about John F. Kennedy as I see that black-and-white planet turn. During a Mary Tyler Moore show I come in from football practice. I am a football player but father insists I become a professional player and a Rhodes scholar. I rebel, quit, and become loathsome in my father's sight. After watching NOVA, I state that each steak we ate from a different cow, butchered and packaged in the freezer has a slightly different taste because DNA was unique from calf to calf. Mother interrupted me Nothing changes, she said. I don’t like your questions. What questions? I asked. That is 1974. My father cites football again, and familiar storms of confusion descend on our table. Now as I watch an old Seinfeld I wonder: Can I wash the sins of my ancestors away, my parents in particular, away as Augustine declared? Each parental pattern from my cells, each cause and consequence of their lives, still push and drag me. Augustine confesses to crying over a fictional character in a poem. I cry sometimes comically over the absurdity of TV shows embodied in these words that you read, words that choke in bitter reality. I don't hope to be innocent and my mother, dead, can't forgive, can't unlock this misery or stop the dark lament and the darker laughter. I just want to lick honey fresh from the hive as it drips from the comb and see a Star Trek I've never seen before. |
PORTLAND OREGON SHOP DISPLAY, Photograph by Keith Moul |
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WALK NORTH
by J. Alan Nelson A commercial laundry hums where my old corral stood. The stable lies in shambles, and survey flags mark a future donut shop. By ancient standards my son is adult sixteen years old diapers a memory only in my mind. My own father presses guilt subtly. He robbed me that trip I was to take with my son for a strained Christmas visit to listen to a rich fundamentalist brother-in-law formerly a friendly poor liberal. My son thinks his grandfather great. I cannot rob that from him for dad’s disappointment in me was mutual. I exist as an awkwardly married man whose biggest seduction in the last decade was the sexy pastor's wife who served Irish coffee while the cat turned over the tree. I walk away from responsibilities that have robbed my life from me walk north, north across states and provinces as close to the pole as this future cadaver can manage. Athletic feats decades ago are meaningless. Stories about past sports feats mean less. I’m no Scrooge, but I hate Christmas, and pine needles, whisky and beef jerky, all smells linked with the season. Empyrean is an ancient belief of pure fire or pure light, in the highest reaches of heaven I walk toward the pole of that heaven that belief long forsaken, All ideals long broken I walk, to seek due north cold without map. |
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