Run the Red Lights. Ed Skoog

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      is electricity, seems lighter than a scatter

      and yet in the inexplicable universe I’m there

      again, and it’s now again, summer of the Macarena.

      Two months in Abilene, Kansas, and I see

      nobody in the central air of the Sunflower Hotel.

      My eighth-floor window stares down buttery hills.

      Streetlights pink the tracks downtown

      like a chalk outline to fill in later.

      I’m writing a novel set among historians

      working at the Eisenhower Library.

      I go to its chapel daily, sit before his tomb

      then sit in my kitchenette, alone and twenty-three.

      Some weekends I drive to Kansas City

      where a woman who won’t need me

      lets me stay over, though at sex I’m still a boy,

      as at rigorous thinking, naive, unskilled,

      fascinated by form and lazy about content,

      but I work the paths that lead from myself.

      Ike stays a boy, winning the worst war.

      As president little happened we praise him for,

      and by we I mean the characters,

      among the adult troubles they fall into

      and I don’t understand. This summer

      at the Democratic Convention in Chicago,

      where the man who gives Leaves of Grass

      away carelessly will be renominated,

      the delegates keep doing the macarena

      every time I look at the lobby TV.

      The vice president claims during his speech

      to be doing the macarena, but does not move,

      then offers to demonstrate it again. Presidents

      are always late in the day of their time.

      Like dances, our political lives come and go.

      It’s the summer of all dances, coffee leaping

      in the percolator, gravity-defiant solitude,

      and through the window, houses and fields

      seduced in their own passing crazes

      of seasons, life and death, which won’t need me.

The Empty House

      Only children have homes; and an adult who feels at home in the world is out of touch with reality. Growing up means needing a map. Children shouldn’t feel lost; adults should feel lost because that is what they are.

      Adam Phillips, On Balance

      Help me remember which house was mine,

      or name. Which way to live in hazard.

      Ours held work, applesauce, and milk,

      cabinets never closed, like movie crypts,

      and the sink a bay of sunken ships.

      But in the empty house next door

      an obstinate order obtained in gray,

      glimpsed rooms without sweat

      and sex and no sex and sleep,

      toilet unfreckled by use, porcelain

      curves like the neck of a marble nude.

      Sprinklers met their times, some

      lights inside on timers mocked schedule.

      No maggots wiggled in their trash cans,

      although they had a couple in the alley,

      side by side, wired into place, fathomless.

      Today I pick up my last paycheck. My son

      yodels at the ceiling. My wife folds towels

      before going to her job, her reward for not

      writing stories anymore. I watch my son all summer.

      Outside, roadwork goes on in light rain.

      The steamroller’s under the maple.

      As steam swirls off the asphalt, a worker

      strides across it, and doesn’t burn.

      Larger roller, the storm wraiths down.

      The sides of houses, no matter who

      lives in them, are luminous in rain.

      Summer crouches in the weeds like a burglar.

Driving

      Like a diplomat with an assassin

      closing in, I never take a second

      way home, draw my string figure

      around Topeka streets, stairstep

      and spiral through neighborhoods

      split and stitched across railroad,

      highway, and river. I’ve never known

      anyone’s body as well as I learn

      each turn the turn an idea makes,

      luck-damaged and sprawling grid

      which compels me to connect

      each street with bouquet of song

      unspooling in the passenger seat.

      Beyond the city, I want to hear the whole

      concept album, drive to college towns

      for better radio, remote chapels, the ice

      cream store north with its one

      pinball machine featuring Kiss.

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