American Song - Alison Luterman

[Larry Robinson]

American Song
 
I'm in sweatpants, pouring boiling water
over grounds that smell of soil
and autumn ferment.
The radio is pouring out Bye bye
Miss American Pie
so I scoop up the cat for a dance.
Hey Jackson, this country has lost
its mind and I don't know
what to do I whisper,
right into his soft pink ear.
He stares at me quizzically,
his narrow face part lynx,
part fallen angel and I don't know what
he says back except it looks like
I want to eat you.
All these years I've spent
pouring words onto the page,
while the work of the street goes on
outside my window:
traffic and yelling and mariachi and wafting
smoke from my neighbor's barbeque,
and kids walking to school and their parents
running after them with homework they forgot.
The poem works or it doesn't,
my life has meaning, or not,
and it all keeps pouring through anyway,
like lava, molten, relentless.
And yes, I am caught
in the honey of my time
like a bug trapped in amber,
and I make what I can of the struggle.
Okay Jackie, I say to my disdainful,
needy familiar.
We're well on our way
toward the mouth of the falls now, 
so let me be poured like oil 
or wine or cool sweet water,
over the lip of the world,
into the heart of the song.    

	- Alison Luterman 
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