Dick Allen
Texas Prison Town
"The only French he ever learned was à la mode
and went his whole life thinking it meant ice cream,"
she was saying. This was in a small green and brown diner
on the edge of Texas, on one of those spectacular Texas days
when it seems the wind will blow sweetly across your face
forever and ever. "Yessir," she said, "yessir,
he was some fixins." After a while, as we listened,
the talk at the next table veered accountably
onto Death Row prison meals. Last meals. "Enchiladas!
Guacamole, sour cream,
and draft beer so swirl-around-on-your-tongue
your whole body starts grinning." Another chimed in, "No,
steak and french fries, salsa on the side,
and for desert a shoot-yr-mama slice of yellow cake
with thick chocolate icing. Glasses of whole white milk,
and one of those little white-with-green-inside mints
as you roll out the door." And here we were thinking
Eggs Benedict, poached salmon, Neapolitans,
a spectacular Port, an ancient Chablis—forgetting
this was the edge of Texas where the warden sets
a twenty dollar limit from one local restaurant,
and allows you a cigarette, maybe. . . . The last three hundred miles
as we’d driven ourselves from New Orleans, life playing with us
its usual accidental games of random A.M. songs,
rest stops, glimpses of strangers’ faces, chance encounters
with a cross on a hill,
gray dogs barking,
city sunshine on an emerald ring,
we’d been talking of adjectives, how adjectives
can dull a noun down into mud, or sometimes
send it crazily spinning, as in twisty or rampant,
weather-beaten, chaotic, windstruck,
and turn a whole phrase into an advertisement for perfume,
an adventure,
or a dirge beside a river grave. The old cliché
footloose and fancy-free had been stuck in my mind for weeks now,
and hither and yon. . . . Our recent neighbors kept moving
because "we don’t want this to be our last house," they said,
and every few years, my parents would buy a new car
"so this one won’t be the last." Then there were
those caravans of silver Airstreams
we’d passed on the road, and big clumps of them
gathered on fairgrounds like cylinders of oxygen. . . . Philip Wylie
advised his travel-book readers never to return
to any vacation spot where they’d been terribly happy,
because they’d ruin it for good, rubbing off the gold,
dulling the palm trees, muting pavilion music. Gears. Years.
Proud Mary
rollin’ on the River. The object
is to let yourself loose within reason
and buttercups
and old computer monitors. . . . "The Last Time I Saw Paris,"
one woman pronounced. Her girlfriends chimed in: "Save the last dance for
me."
"The Last Tango." "The Last Leaf." "The Last Goodbye."
"I wouldn’t love you if you were the last man on earth."
"The Last Hurrah." "The last shall be first."
"Last but not least." "He who laughs last, laughs best"
and on and on they went. We paid our check. Outside
in a corral-like parking lot we’d never see again,
on a warm afternoon we’d never live in again,
being the people we’d never be again,
we watched the cars on the highway moving up towards Dallas
for a minute or two (we’d never know again)
and then joined the others, swinging ourselves into line.
from The Day Before: New Poems, Sarabande Books, 2003.