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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Walk This Lonesome PETER BAROTH ________________________ Road and Station All the people walking by and all the planes up in the sky and all the evenings, the yearning, yawning evenings. Once I approached the lights of Allentown and I wondered then if the sound of rubber on the road is the closest that I - ll ever come to home. A few days later it - s the Jersey night parading by in all its finery as the millions go about their business, tread their unique paths through life, lonely paths, lonely, lovely, thirsting paths, as they end up at home, sometimes alone. And I - m trying to do something. I am a wandering bum dressed up in a tie and jacket. I am a lunatic with a regular job, a deviant with a good psychiatrist. An Ancient living like a Modern. Someday I too, may wander the Newark train station waiting for my ship to come in. I am somebody - s son who flirts with failure like a childhood game of peek a boo. Peek a boo and I - m gone - onto the train or into the car. Away. [455]
Budapest Woman In the long afternoon of Central Europe a woman walks a city block. Weary and beautiful in slinky thin garments. Belly button pierced. Hints of sexual underground licking upwards into the passage of everyday life. Long angular aerodynamic legs. Brown eyes. Her hair a dirty blond verging on chestnut with flecks of orange interspersed. She slowly ambles past the sooty buildings. The looming monoliths which have withstood war and revolution, along avenues brimming with a history of elegant aristocrats plotting in stately hotels, vindictive proletarians fresh from foreign capitals plotting on street corners, and the bourgeoisie, ever the bourgeoisie, but faded now. Muted like the colors of a gray urban autumn. A world of civil servants, lawyers, and doctors fallen through the play of extremes in a country where it seems the center cannot hold. Through all of this the woman moves on. Into the evening, a restaurant, and the firelight. Cozy pocket of a continent. Lonely lovely capital. Lonely lovely woman. Will she fulfill her desires tonight? Darkness falls. The city eases forward into uncertainty. Bodies scramble on a televised soccer game. Couples come to a dimly lit bar. Drab, solitary days. Love and the daily struggle [456]
in a tucked away European corner. The romance of the coming twilight at the end of the long afternoon. [457]
Lists What was her name? I - m trying to remember but it - s lost, lost in the haze of summer, in the craze of adolescence. I remember the Holiday Inn pool back in Oklahoma and a friend working at the motel as a bellboy and how I used to sneak in, leaving my bike at the gate, and my friend - s smirk under a rakish Okie moustache. And this girl and I were making out in the pool and her fingernails flared a bright orange as my hand fell under her bathing suit. And then we had submarine sandwiches somewhere around campus and another friend was there with his girlfriend. But her name, the name of my girl, has been gone for decades. Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Barstow I remember her laugh. St. Louis, Philadelphia Where she was from Chicago, New York where she was headed Heidelberg, Budapest I have no idea. I have no recollection of how old she was or I was or where she went to school. But she was there, laughing in a summer afternoon, and she is part of my history, and I hers. Lazy, hazy, crazy. Larry, Curly, Moe. [458]
John, Paul, George, Ringo. Marx, Engels. Einstein, Freud, Jesus. People who come and go. Who have come and gone, and this memory that sticks, that dwells in the back corridors of my mind of a sunny day and an intimate stranger. It - s all right, it - s all right Jesus, I know it hurts. I know it man. The time for glory may be gone. And I don - t even have a name. I don - t even have a name. [459]
Three Minute Dream St. Louis with lambent halo. Schism of a river and a Scott Joplin rag at midnight. The aftermath of a lonely, drug addled moan across disordered and neglected Midwestern rooms. Across the darkness of continents, centuries, bad evenings, twilights, Cubist constructs, bold and savage. A conquest by Barbarians? I - ve been there before. Facing the death of the soul at technology - s bootheel; the metallic feeling on my neck. So heal me now, saints and martyrs, through the dark dew. Show me the way past anger to the peace at the end of the corridor. To the light at tunnel - s terminus. To that final coming to terms with one - s fate, one - s mission, one - s purpose. Drunk, I tripped through the tavern in its shimmering light. Then hit the nighttime volleyball circuit with Chuck Speedy and the boys. A finger broken by the serve of a Pocono biker, years after being taken down by the cops in my front yard. Bright angels do hide in the cover of a dark history - sometimes. Once I thought about the possibility of living on another planet. Mars, Venus, the nearest one available, for haven - t we failed the Earth? Other times thinking of a vegetarian regimen, of going organic, in a country running scared - of the world, of itself, of the blue notes of its geniuses. Through the mists we must still grow. Breathing, injured, alive. [460]
Poem For Dean Paul Martin I swear, brother, this isn - t going to be about saying goodbye at 35, or leaving Dad - s head hanging, or leaving a generation to curl up with Reagan and reaction. No, this is going to be about fast cars, faster planes, and fastest of all, the women rolling out of bed at 4:00 a.m. for their modeling jobs, leaving a twisting trail of negligee behind on gilt edged Beverly Hills bathroom floors. Consider it a fan letter of sorts, destined for the seventh heaven on whose winged beachhead you must now lie. This is going to be about flying out of Oklahoma City in your own turbo prop, interior design by my father with his Bauhaus touch spiced with Southwestern sepias and sunset oranges. Oil bid - ness blues and grays. Did you ever stop to take it all in? And where were you headed? There is no itinerary for me to peruse. Only a black and white glossy which hangs on my wall, filigreed with a starry star - s smile. A Buddha - s grin which speaks volumes without saying a word. So where was it to next, Captain? Vegas, Miami, L.A.? They say you were nice. A bit of a tennis bum. Good behind the wheel. So what sort of Valhalla are you lying in? Surrounded by what sort of sad beautiful tangle of wasted angelic starlets dead too young of anorexia or heroin o.d.? Is James Dean anywhere to be found? I - m missing your advice [461]
along with Coburn - s and McQueen - s. I wonder what your school of cool might have to say about me. I read the classics, once. I like jazz. But I - m down here in a world on fire. Send the hook and ladder. Brother. [462]
Thinking About James The temperature would fall about a hundred degrees when he entered the room. He was down with it. You could almost hear the jazz chords being strummed as he walked on in like the groovemasters before him from the beginning of the Civil Rights movement to the present day. He was free - liberated. He was like you and me would be after another ten years of evolution. The women loved him. The men admired him. He was out against it: the war, oppression. He was for it: women - s rights, affirmative action. He took a cocktail in his hands - a gin fizz for digestion. The music would start again for real. I think it was "Funky Broadway" by Dyke and the Blazers. An oldie too hot for the oldies stations to play. He entered the room and the party would never be the same. He would take a sip from his glass and lay an incantation of a poem - a remembrance of Hughes, Baldwin, Robeson. The women relaxed, the men would steel themselves for the night to come, and I would be relieved that this new world would be safe for another day. [463]
A Pause Between Movements These were no longer the good years but the good years still cast their shadow. Al Hirt had passed away. Hemingway. Yet women in the afternoon, good looking women, yearning, still reached out for something. Prosperity was still just around the corner. Some of the old heroes were still celebrated, though they may have been past their peak; warbling away in echo chambers of fame. You could still squeeze your toes in the sand along the shore and look for shells and sea glass. And you could look out at the breaking water and see where the surfers still dwelt. But was the next new idea going to be microelectronic or biochemical? Would it have to do with God or the way some new generation of California kids moved on their skateboards? Sundays were still easy but around 3 pm there might come a slight twinge. A prick inflicted by a Baghdad thief. The poverty of Camden, West Virginia, Gaza rustled and coiled like a snake poised in the darkness. People still went about their daily routines, but their days might now end with a psychiatrist's visit. There was anxiety. There were all the old questions which sent some people to libraries, some to clergymen, some to bars or bards, some to pill bottles. Making a stand, a person so often faced such vitriolic slings and arrows, that dialogue was threatened. Bluster was beginning to seize the race from democracy. Around the world, the dispossessed were striking, excoriating. [464]
and the schoolgirls of Philadelphia who may have once had their silver haired senators to embrace, now embraced the wind along the Delaware. Danced with it in broken pas de deux. For in time, the silver haired senators had become dirty old men. [465]
Peter Baroth was born in Chicago in 1963 and currently resides in Media, Pennsylvania. He is a 1985 graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and obtained his J.D. from Temple University Law School in 1990. Baroth's legal practice is in immigration counseling. Baroth's published poetry includes three chapbooks, Mounds of Sounds, Sessions, and Ski Oklahoma published by Wordrunner Chapbooks. He is also the author of a novel, Long Green (iUniverse, 2003). Peter Baroth: "Poem for Dean Paul Martin" and "Lists" were previously published online at museumofpoetry.com. "Three Minute Dream" previously appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts; "Thinking About James" was previously published in Philadelphia Poets. |
