A Truck Full of Whiskey and Decadence
Driving over the Blue Ridge Mountains, my car radio plays
music about men in pickup trucks
who cheat on their wives. On another station
a woman sings, ‘O, sweet Jesus, bring me hope.’
Listening, I remember the songsters I loved
whose glittering notes brought me imagined decadence.
I knew nothing about the meaning of decadence
except what I learned from movies, songs and plays.
Now warbled notes of failed love
bring back my father’s swaying whiskey truck.
Like his cigar smoke rings, he and hope
disappeared. I sat for hours in Penn Station
before the homeless lived their lives in railroad stations.
There I learned about card-sharks’ decadence
and how to live without hope.
In shantytowns under the Pulaski Skyway, children played
as if they didn’t hear the wailing police truck
that hauled away unshaven fathers who no longer loved
them. Without a father to coo love
in bedtime lullabies, I left the cold railroad station,
and hitched a ride from a cross-country truck,
whose burning tires spun on-the-road decadence.
Lady Day was the singer its radio would play,
her sad voice throaty and without hope,
the personification of hope-
lessness. I’m waiting to see will the one I love
be coming back to me, the record played,
like the lonesome whistle of a train, passing deserted stations.
At the movies, Marlene Dietrich smoldered German decadence,
and I thought I heard my father calling from his truck.
Then he rose like a phoenix from the ashen truck,
become the Herr Professor in ‘Blue Angel’, who, I hoped
wouldn’t be enslaved by beer-hall decadence.
Father, I cried, I need love.
Why did you leave me with boozy men in Penn Station?
Now as I listen to the songs my car radio plays,
like a faded film, the whiskey truck of my childhood love
dissolves. Hope, like a train stalled in the station,
won’t depart while this decadent, sweet music plays.
Page(s) 38-39
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