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I wonder whatever happened to
The beautiful advertisements of my youth
I used to see through the bars of the streetcar windows
Lurching to town in the old inevitable way
Where everything I knew I loved and loved because I knew
Slid through my heart like blood on iron wheels,
The cleanest dreams in town . . .
I mean the mysterious things in the billboards
That said just like mother made
Only more so things you couldn't understand,
Or the 100-year-old bread
(Long corridors and dusky limbs of Egyptian
Girls, dancing at orgies. A sudden plague.
Immediate death. And the bread on the table
Uneaten. Unearthed a hundred years later
By sterilized men in beards and white coats
Who carry it in wrappers of antique gold
To the A&P across the Park for the Keenans),
Or the Planters Peanut that walked the streets and gave
Himself away on a spoon, with the imploring eyes
Of a man inside the uncracked shell of death,
Or the car in the tree forty feet high
(Amos' Auto Parts and Welding Service)
And me wondering how it got there
Through most of the days of my formative years
And learning at last in the stillness of sleep that it grew
There, the rusting petals of the yellow convertible
Clashing like thunder at night in its angry unfolding.
All the innocent, contrived conceits of my boyhood,
Polished and mannered as my grandfather, who lived
By a code of ethics in business and died, in a way,
Like a man who stuck his humming head inside
The engine of a car at Hendrick's Service Station
And had
it
eaten off up to the hips,
The legs still there when I was a boy,
Dribbled on the edge of the open maw like seaweed,
Sucking in the customers rain or shine.
