Where I’m From, Part 1

The ubiquitous Goodyear blimp over downtown Akron

Sometimes I use poetry to excavate and examine my life. I admire how Adrianne Lenker, of the band Big Thief, connects her art to memory. In a New Yorker profile piece she said, “I like my songs to be reminders of certain things that I don’t want to forget.” And in a Song Exploder podcast, she talked about her song “Cattails”: “It’s encapsulated in my memory in this beautiful way that I can return to.” 

A third-grader in 1962, I became an altar boy amidst the changes of Vatican II. In eighth grade, I was tapped to serve funeral masses, which would get me out of class, offer me plenty of chances to sling the incense, and sometimes result in an envelope of tips from the grieving family. This poem was written in response to a prompt I’d handed to my students, based on a poem by George Ella Lyon.

Where I’m From

I’m from the six o’clock mass assignment

the sleepy stumbling five-minute walk from home

to enter the dark silence of the sanctuary

I’m from the black cassock buttoned to my knees

and the loose lacy sleeves of the white surplice

I’m from the lighting of the tall candles

throwing a dim flickering light over 

the widows with their rosaries and novenas

and the rows of empty wooden pews

I’m from the balancing of the weighty Missal in my hands

so Father Archibald could read the prayers and rituals

the presentation of the crystal cruets of water and wine

the lifting of the clutch of altar bells

their sudden ring piercing the silence

signaling the miraculous transubstantiation

I’m from the small black disk of incense

we lit and placed in the censer, which we then 

swung from its chain with sober abandon

the holy smoke rising to the vaulted ceiling

the acrid smell of some burning plant resin

some sandalwood or frankincense or myrrh

I’m from bowed heads and genuflections and 

overheated by the vestments and hungry for breakfast

growing faint and woozy on the altar

I’m from the Pater Noster qui es in caelis

the Latin memorized in third grade

the Dominus vobiscum and the Et cum spiritu tuo

And I’m from stalling after mass as we disrobed

waiting for the priest to leave 

so we could sample the communion wine

to see what God tasted like

In Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful novel Housekeeping she writes, “There is so little to remember of anyone – an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

Hide and Seek

Immersed in the act of hiding,

finding the unlikeliest nook. Then I become

tiny, silent, still, inconspicuous, invisible,

inside the willow thicket by the swing set,

becoming a part of the background, or 

nothing, a secret never whispered.

When footsteps approach,

breathing is postponed.

The art of camouflage.

One by one, the others are discovered;

they too join the search, increasing the numbers

seeking the lost lamb or lone wolf, who becomes

more removed from this world, more

distant, until he abandons his body,

there in its hiding place,

and joins the search.

As the summer dusk gathers and thickens,

he waits to hear the song that calls him back:

“Olly olly oxen free!”

In the way that memory sometimes works, swinging from scene to scene free-associatively, I’ll turn to another vestment of my past. And another lovely quote from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: “For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”

Concerning a Pair of Pants

They are floating there in the closet of my memories from some fifty years ago, so palpable that I can almost reach out and touch them. I was sixteen when I bought them at one of the hip boutiques sprouting up in Midwestern cities such as Akron, reeking of patchouli. It was an audacious purchase for a little white suburban Catholic-school kid.

They were silvery and shimmery and sheer, made from some space-age material. Polyester? Rayon? Sprayon? Hip-hugging and bell-bottomed, they felt like nothing and yet seemed to express everything I aspired to be. I figured I had nothing to lose except my virginity.

Occasionally, I wore them to school, but it was hard to feel studious when so attired. Instead, they were my go-to party pants, a costume that put me in the mood to be somebody else: the distant cousin of Ziggy Stardust. I felt Funkadelic and Superfly. I was ready to “take a walk on the wild side.” 

Without thinking, I strutted and sauntered and slunk as if a soul brother – as if! I usually got into some kind of small-time trouble, something involving a carload of guys and a mooning incident or a bottle of peppermint schnapps or a girl named Patty or Sally or Megan. On a particularly fortuitous and far-fetched night, all three.

What became of those pants? Who knows? I literally or figuratively outgrew them the summer after my senior year.

I was born in the Rust Belt city of Akron, Ohio, and until the age of five, I lived with my parents in a third-floor apartment on the corner of East Voris Street and Wolf Ledges Parkway, in South Akron. This poem was certainly paying attention to Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago.” 

I Sing of Akron

Rubber Capital of the World

I’m talking tires, my friend – vulcanized tires

B. F. Goodrich, Goodyear, General Tire, Firestone, Seiberling

Those vast smoky factories making tires for Motor City’s madness

“Wherever wheels are rolling, no matter what the load

The name that’s known is Firestone, where the rubber meets the road”

Friday night high school football games were played at the Rubber Bowl

The working class crowd’s rumbles and cheers rolled out of the stadium

And steered the steep slope of Derby Downs, home of the All-American Soap Box Derby

Not far from the hangars that housed those bulbous leviathans of the sky, the Goodyear blimps

I remember driving across the long high viaduct over the Cuyahoga River Gorge

The orange neon lights flashing A-C-M-E ACME FOODS, teaching me how to read

But in the shadows beneath that bridge, what perverse versions of torture took place?

What did you do to your sons and daughters – your winos, your whores, your day laborers with their glazed eyes?

Afterward, did you give them a bottle of Norka pop – your name spelled backward in all the colors – grape, cherry, lemon-lime?

Do the West Virginia hillbillies who escaped the coal mines, coughing up black lung, still live by the factories, in Goodyear Heights and Firestone Park?

Do the Italians and their ravioli-and-cannoli families still live near St. Anthony’s on North Hill?

Even now, the voluptuous syllables of those Italian names haunt me: Gina Iacobucci, Gina Iacobucci, Gina Iacobucci

Do the Ukranians still live on the south side, within walking distance of Holy Ghost Church?

Debbie Ukraniec and those other beautiful dark-eyed Ukraine girls made me sing and shout

And what magic inspired that hardcourt hero of the Fighting Irish, Saint V–St. Mary’s LeBron?

Meanwhile, the Wops and Micks and Polacks and Bohunks mix it up

In Akron, city of factories and working class neighborhoods

City of tires, city of rubber

Chrissie Hynde’s song “My City Was Gone” will take us out. A couple years older than me, she went to Firestone High School and then Kent State before moving to London and eventually putting together The Pretenders.