Ubi Sunt
- “A poetic motif emphasizing the transitory nature of
youth, life, and beauty …”
- Collins English Dictionary
In the bottom left corner of Pennsylvania,
along the brindle Monongahela,
and a string of spent coal hamlets
that played out in the town of California,
I walked-on – a freshman pole vaulter,
at the small state college.
For a sole season was I a Vulcan,
fire-god, red and black silks and singlet –
more smolder, smoke, than burn –
the sputtering script of my life
as an athlete I’d authored to the bitter end.
Often, I fouled at the first height,
scratching the forbidden cross-bar,
then pitched with it –
scrubbed from the board –
into the bloated Cloud Nine pit.
My name appeared but once
in The Cal Times –
misspelled, of course.
Yet the few riffs of romance remain:
the occasions I did clear the ether and score,
the formal feeling of donning the colors,
prancing the runway for the jump;
thumbing frigid to campus from practice
every Appalachian eve on California Road;
nocturnal bus treks in a sprung Bluebird
to spooky locker rooms
in West Virginia and central PA.
Through the night, I stacked the turntable
six deep with LPs. One by one,
they dropped to the needle: After the Gold Rush,
John Barleycorn Must Die, Déjà Vu,
Tea for the Tillerman, Blue,
The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys.
I posted my first benighted lyrics,
based on despair I’d yet to notch,
to The New Yorker (I wish I were kidding) –
on lined loose-leaf, in prim penmanship,
untyped, no SASE – certain I’d vouchsafed
in wholly new ways ache and yearn
(ubi sunt, a literary term I’d acquired
in American Literature), and its editors
would concur with Hosannas,
rather than laugh, which they must have done.
Morning, I ran the graveyard before class;
memorized “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,”
undone by Faith’s ribbons in “Young Goodman Brown.”
I spied Claggart’s “black blood”
in the shower grout and sidewalk cracks.
How I loved the symbol –
stammering Billy, dangling
in white from the yardarm.
I hopped a Monongahela Railway
freighter hauling coal upriver
and clung till my hands numbed
to a rusty ladder spined up the caboose.
White birds sailed over fraught water.
The moon rolled out of the woods
and I leapt –
ripped open in the railbed my jeans,
scarped and cindered palms,
tumbled, a little lonesome,
into the weeds, but not so bad.
Then I walked the crossties back to California,
for another all-nighter with Puritan theology,
and my dormitory of Mon Valley droogs
from Monessen, Donora, Belle Vernon –
their Sunshine and glue, formaldehyde,
peyote, a bushel of Downs;
Alice Cooper and long green WWII trench coats
from the Army Surplus in Charleroi
where I purchased a machete
just before we hitch-hiked home
for Christmas to fetch lottery numbers
in the Vietnam draft.
