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Back-Door Pastoral
Apologies to all you urbanites,
To decent people who prefer to live
Amidst the noise with far too many lights,
Who find it much too easy to forgive
The traffic and the mendicants who claim
They have no home. I’m saddened to announce
That swamps and urban parks are just the same,
The predators in each prepared to pounce
Upon an unsuspecting victim. Yes,
The glade you think you live in is a shithole
(Your children’s future anybody’s guess)
Protected by a schizophrenic pit bull.
Refuse to dream? Now, that would be a pity.
But there can never be a first-class city.
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Life’s Lessons
”… And, mother, do not cry!” —Edward Farmer
So, here I am again, recording my regrets,
If only as a lesson for posterity.
At least one hundred thousand glowing cigarettes
Belie the claim I practiced strict austerity.
If every single drink that’s poured deserves another,
Then I have been as ethical as anyone.
Though I ignored the warnings of my sainted mother,
She always sheltered me when I was on the run.
I took in strays, and let them share my living space,
With never any thought that I would be repaid.
I braced my critics, and I looked them in the face,
While telling them no promises had yet been made.
Three kinds of women there have always been, some say:
The ones you had good times with, ones beyond your reach,
And others who have packed their bags and gone away.
Take it or leave it; I have nothing more to teach.
And yet, if I should ever pause to reconsider
The actual formal cause of my impending doom,
I might decide it was the teenage babysitter
Who set up shop inside my mother’s living room.
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C.B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden. Hundreds of his poems have appeared in scores of print and electronic journals out of North America, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Australia and India. His collection, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder was published in 2013 by White Violet Press.
I am still laughing at the final two lines of the second poem! What an incredible image that produced in my mind!
I’m always glad to have induced a laugh, Roy, and I guess I could say that these final lines are a comment on the insufficiency of surrogacy.
I travel a lot of work and visit many major metro areas in the US, sadly the homeless are overrunning many downtown areas and parks. It’s a major problem is several cities.
Yes, Michael, there are good cities and there are bad cities, but none as bad as those controlled by rabid Democrats. What’s funny is how quickly they cleaned up San Francisco when their Chinese masters were coming to town.
Both of these demand a careful reading, since their meaning is not immediately apparent. The sonnet is in the voice of someone not living in a major city, who sees the squalid conditions that now obtain in those places, but who also assures city dwellers that much of the same problem is true in “swamps and urban parks.” He says that “the glade” where he lives is also infested with “predators” looking for victims, and is a “shithole” that needs to be protected by a “pit bull.” In other words, the miasmic decay that hangs over large urban centers is now spreading everywhere else in the country.
The slant rhyme of “shithole” and “pit bull” is both creative and unexpected. I once tried to find a rhyme for “shithole” and all I could think of was the Elizabethan “wittol” (a cuckold who knows of his wife’s infidelity, and tolerates it). Others are vittle, fiddle, whittle, or verbal phrases like “the kid’ll…”, but one’s poem might seem rhyme-driven if one tries to use them.
The second poem is harder to analyze. It is confessional (whether fictive or real doesn’t matter), presenting a look-back at ones’ life and a summing up of possible mistakes. But it quickly leads to comments on the speaker’s mother, segues into a general judgment of types of women, and then suddenly switches to a tantalizing cryptic comment on a teenage babysitter. The poem reads as if the juicier details of that story, and of the speaker’s relations with women, are being kept hidden.
I would put it the other way, Joseph, that urban centers should not try to emulate seething swamps. And I would never dare to confess the more scandalous events in my past.
I enjoyed both of these poems very much, C.B., but with a special nod to “Back Door Pastoral” which somehow manages to make the dystopia of our homeless-ridden cities into something grittily memorable. Your tone is a unique blend of caustic and elegiac and I read it as something of a requiem for a lost dream along with a slap on the head for people to open their eyes. It’s extremely sad but also gratifying sobering.
I think you read, Brian, better than I write, but that does not disturb me. Your comments always open my eyes.
I so agree with “Back Door Pastoral”! Even when I was growing up near Chicago, and it was many levels better than it is now, I didn’t like being there. It seemed like a foreign place for a human to be. “Shithole / pit bull” is brilliant — LOL, as the acronym goes. I assume you chose to write this one in sonnet form to set an ironic tone. (?)
I grew up in a small-town suburb, Cynthia, but I was always a country boy at heart. I can’t remember setting out to write a sonnet; that’s just how it came out.
Your message in the first poem is very subtly and artfully conveyed. On the surface, you could be saying, only that “the grass is always greener on the other side.” A deeper dive reveals an accurate glimpse of the decay of our society.
It took me a while to realize that the second poem is a dramatic monologue. Like any good one, it leaves me, wondering more about the narrator’s background and psyche.
There does come a time, Adam, to abandon subtlety, but never the same for art. And the truth of the matter is that envy is always greener when it is closest. There are types of decay that even my good dentist cannot remedy, and I am glad that you wrote “narrator” rather than “speaker.”
C.B., I love these for their craft (rhyming “shithole” with “pit bull” is a stroke of poetic genius), the fact they have made me smile, but most of all, for their stark, in-your-face depiction of life in the raw – where “… (Your children’s future anybody’s guess) / Protected by a schizophrenic pit bull.” – exactly! “Life’s Lessons” makes me think of Kipling’s “If” – the non-fairytale version. Great stuff!
I love it, Susan, when poets find a way to cross-fertilize, and I know that your apperceptions of reality is nonpareil. I’m glad this one got past the censors.