In the old days, before
so many had refrigerators,
there were what were called ice houses.
In the summer of 1960, we
visited one in Texas, on the way
to Lake Texoma.
So we today who learned to write
in the old way, stop by for a block of ice
to keep what happened overnight
from infecting our poetry –
do it in fact even on learning the president lied
when he said the intel on Iranian
nukes’d changed when it was exactly
the same as it’d been three months ago,
or when we see video of a bunch of masked men
in plain clothes with assault rifles chasing
an old man with a weedeater around a parking lot,
then tackling, macing, and beating the tar out of him.
But you know in the heat and the friction,
direction and misdirection, in the dirt,
grass, and asphalt, or in the five thousand
degrees of thirty-ton bomb explosions
and the hot air coming out of a leader’s mouth,
that block of ice – after all, it’s only
fifty pounds – quickly melts, and very
soon you discover that every word of verse
you’ve got isn’t only extremely hot
but infected with the embarrassing news of the day.
David Stevenson
Farmington
