Rust and Moths

The train tracks of my childhood are rusted and bent,
the trees all chopped down, stumps ground.
The old roads are broken, busted into bits of gravel.
Underneath that bland tan paint, a vibrant yellow house
with breadbasket blue trim shines through like history
and its brilliant television broadcasts to our youthful grandparents.

Grandfather milkman gambled away his heart and his bread,
left an angry older brother, a broken Grandmother,
and Hank Williams records to raise Father.
Grandfather soldier gambled away his heart and his head,
left nothing but a Grandmother soaked in Scotch, a starry axe,
and a hot iron on the head for Mother.

The wallpaper peeled more each winter, withered by the gas heater.
This is our Country and these are our Lives, and we are all Oldsmobiles
perpetually westward peering, wrapping our heads around the horizon.
From Dutch beginnings and first Jamestown to the Empty Empire of the Midwest,
the sweet tea dreams of the American South, to the toothy coasts of California,
to the deepest blue isolations of the icy Pacific!

Our hearts hammer like iron hooves, our eyes are vast and arid as deserts.
I was born in a sacred silver bathtub, schooled in the silent cathedrals of autumn.
Each year the old neighborhood ages, the neighbors turn gray as moss,
termites chew and the winds, O Boy, they hover and raze the air!
A cypress house stands forever, a cypress coffin floats like a bar of soap or the Biblical ark,
a cypress tree falls under a windy hand, lies dead and naked, stripped of its bark.