Poem for Tybee and Buckeye by Adam Brunz

“ … only the very poor, or eccentric, can surround themselves with shapes of elegance (soon to be demolished) in which they are forced by poverty to move with leisurely grace. We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet, to one side, and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all.”

                                                                     Lew Welch, via Gary Snyder’s “Night Highway Ninety-nine”

When I spend a long time alone

now and then a burst of gibberish

escapes from my mouth right out loud.

Just a small mound of babble, it washes away.

Like Lew said, “a plainness that obviates all poetry,”

all speech,

it comes out

like a sigh.

The tupelo swamp is brimming with surface,

bald cypress and the barest hint of a path.

There’s a couple in a boat casting their lines:

“Up there where you come from, you prolly call ’em croppie,

but we jus’ call ’em crappy.

It is beautiful out here, ain’t it?

We like it anyway.”

He turns with the drift of the boat

and recasts.

It’s a gray day at the Fort Tybee Museum:

musty halls and epic paintings of the colonists.

Great sloping walls of stone define the sky.

An abandoned beach café gives it up

               to sand and wind and broken glass.

The old fort houses the Lions Club now.

A garden of twisted rebar thrives in its shadow —

               the stalks shoot up between the tumbling ramparts.

The Lions just throw their old furniture

down from the tower.

The stragglers survey the remains —

we recognize the futility of capture.

Meanwhile the Nostalgia Dicks are growing weepy in their nests —

American boyhoods cast in golden memory light.

The general stupor is concave, a sinkhole.

Eccentricity is tolerated,

even allegedly enjoyed (as the conceit of the road less traveled),

that is, until we pursue it,

until we show we’re more serious than disarming,

and a little less serious than the insane.

One of the consequences of an unmapped future

is that so many claim you as their protégé.

Small-town mind is not exclusive to small towns.

The Buddha known as the Beginner, the Creator of Roads,

must necessarily be unhappy, that goes without saying.

All creators shall be properly stroked and coddled —

like the flight attendant says in her pep talk:

“Correct change, as always, will be appreciated.”

At Buckeye Lake

there used to be an amusement park,

now whitewashed remains, a low-rise water tower.

The lakeside dwellers all connect by one sidewalk.

At the end of the walk there’s a bar on a point.

Canal after canal sneaks off around the bend.

A metal retaining wall serves as the actual lake side,

so the folks construct all manner of contraptions

for midair boat suspension overnight or during weather —

great overarching frames of welded pipe,

winches and chains.

When the big storm comes and knocks it all over,

they just put it up again a different way,

what else are you gonna do?

The boys are making bait for catfish.

They’re making strange weapons of the future in the clubhouse

with plastic and some duct tape.

We build a feast on the back patio.

The neighbor rattles off the year and make

of every boat in the boat parade.

In time all one’s families converge,

and what happens is the only rule.

At Buckeye we had burgers at the Blue Goose diner:

a tall blue neon bird shimmers across the evening mist.

The pelicans off Tybee don’t cruise in for their quarry

with any old typical grace,

they kamikaze down and create quite a stir

while over at the Surf Shack

the day’s first kamikazes are just now being stirred.

The local patrons rub their eyes,

place their bets,

and prepare for another off-season dive.

This is resort’s meaning:

no static to shuffle through.

A man walks out of a joint at noon with his cup in his hand,

gestures at a black dog, and breathes.

All manner of ingenuity

               leads us to our eccentric solitude.

What’s respected is the distance

required to live,

when to bridge it, or not:

the surfeiting relief o a sand dollar

or we talk philosophy in a dusky Ohio boat by Cranberry Bog.

Watching for herons,

a traveler’s headache wanes.

There is a definite proclivity

for warm dank air,

a bath for the nervous system.

There are the ruins.

There is a long and misty beach.

No one’s watching,

               we’re all gone fishing.