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Sample Poems by Philip Raisor


How to Get to Muncie

If you're coming from Route 70E,
take the beltway around Indianapolis then 69N
short of Cammack. It's a booger-flick from there.
You'll see signs about the Gas Boom that failed
and State Championships teams that didn't.
All along the flat land family grave sites,
drowning in flooded corn fields, will sour
your stomach, but a sheet of frozen blue sky
will sweeten your memory of skating.

Muncie is not a town you'd seek out, unless
you're an aficionado of glass jars or a historian
of election corruption or recently hired to teach
home economics at a middle school.
Get ready for window displays of sod edgers,
roll-top desks, potted palms, and group pictures
of bible classes. Occasionally, you'll see
black faces in a white crowd and faded prints
of the Klan. A woman, it is touted, is now mayor.

If you're just passing through, the road skirts
the university. Stop at Cycles, a campus pub.
Have a cold draft and a Velvet Crunch baguette,
listen to poets at an open mike, talk to a prof
who grew up here. Yes, in this town
we have stale Dots, moonshine from a truck,
a slow drawl. But if, intrigued, you come to stay,
we'll show you the real us: load-bearing,
complex as cave writings, smarter than lab rats.




A Place That's Known
after Michael Pearson

You were a Catholic kid from the Bronx,
probably a whiz at disorienting the nuns.
Like me you knew loneliness and the smell
of semen under covers. But I had people
moving through me like chalk on a blackboard,
leaving dust.

Aunt Lucille: Lord, I swan. I usually feel so tired.
But today was almost perfect. No riots, no bodies on TV,
no screeching cats under the porch.

Prince Herbie: When he yells, walls swell like floorburns.
He is, I'm telling you, a clarion, tetrarch of noise,
town crier of rafters, shouting YEAH RAH BEARCATS!

Ex-councilman Golly Cribbs: You don't get the sacred
vote by fingering a fag, not here; we push garbage out
of pantries, call for street cleaners.

Charlie Thomas: This ain't no town for black folk or
white children. Color's a thing an' a way of thinkin'
'bout things; here daddy's daddy does the thinkin'
and them bloodlines thinks fieldhands is always
fieldhands. Dog sniffers, I call 'em.

Clarabelle (nee Shoat) Floyd: I'd heard divorce
was as bad as a gravel pit full of junk. Well, I dumped
a piece, a heap with a spittoon mouth and a brain
dead as moleskins. So I'm traveling.

The chatter at the Boar's Head never changes:
basketball, downtown decay, the university.
Then that life and death patter-God, funerals,
politics, commodities-enough farm philosophy
to clog a pig.
You, Michael, were inner city,
I a small-town sponge. Still, we dreamed the same:
to escape, drift, see what James Dean saw
(his house twenty-five miles from mine).
We crossed America, met by chance on the edge
of the continent where fires blazed in someone
else's borough. We marched with flowers
in our hands, and after late-night talkfests
failed to stop the war, we sought peace
in the world's debris beyond our borders.
I climbed mountains; you imagined the other side
and set out by sea. In time, we returned
to our neighborhoods to recall the days and nights
of our becoming. I write about Golly Cribbs;
you excavated Fitz, Pork, and the day Rip
got his brand new name. We still dream,
still want life to matter.

Muncie Rain

Just a simple operation. Life
on its way out of a few severed veins
near the heart. No funeral this time.
Just a squirrel caught on a wire
surprised at the thump it makes
on the street below. Then hobbles off.
Just a cat cascading down a sewer
hunting claws and a branch to scream on.
The shock of helplessness will pass on firm land.
Someone won't have a can to dump garbage in;
someone will miss a carton of beer off the back porch.
Just debris floating by, unused to permanence,
unused to lightning flashing on bent trees,
mud and stones braced in yards,
and grass, breaking through gasps of rain,
looking up.




Raking Leaves

He don't wear no sheet,
Charlie whispers, but he's Klan.
I glance at fat man Hampton,
a sack of laundry,
but this noon my father soaped my mouth
for spewing the S word on my busted thumb,
so Klan is Charlie's worry-I'm brooding on injustice.
Anyway, Hampton seems safe, a Santa at Kiwanis parties,
his wife shows Avon, both as popular as scrabble.
But Charlie's almost my best friend, an eye like Tonto's
(mother would die-an old black handyman, what for?),
so I don my squint-hard mask when Hampton walks up,
asks for matches, his smile a taut rope. I oblige.
He sniffs at Charlie, turns away, as though he's smelled
sullage. Charlie leans on his rake, scouting himself.
Is he being dragged through gravel, knees bouncing,
brain emptying, or garroted maybe, the way Shawnees?
I don't know. I rake hard, track down outlaw leaves,
build my pyre, dive into autumn flames, rise laughing,
my mouth full of chaff. Grim Charlie still leans.
He won't talk I can see, won't fix my bike.
Injustice upon injustice the whole damn day.