No one cares if you don’t wear
a sports jacket into the hearing
room. If you listen with your cauliflower
ears. If you speak with a split lip
you earned on a mat in a high school
gym. It’s impossible not to think
you were trapped into an illegal hold.
A man cranked on your arm,
until all you could do was give.
Promise not to tell anyone
what he did to you, back
in a locker room, on a team
bus with no one around.
Made you fall to your knees
while he counted to three.
Memory’s take down.
Why else would you stone wall
so much reality, rebutting
the testimony across the aisle?
Unless you’ve forgotten you had to
learn this in Ohio. To block everything
out that didn’t fit your version
of the world.
It’s true sometimes we lie
to ourselves to survive.
Without calling it lying.
Sometimes it’s so hot,
in a televised room,
we want to strip off
our clothes. Let anyone
see us as we are, running
to the Lincoln Memorial.
Climbing the steps
to sit on Lincoln’s lap.
To look out across
the mall’s reflecting pool.
Or sit under a bridge
in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio.
Where James Wright,
(yesterday was the anniversary
of his birth)
lied to tell the truth
in his poems. Who wrestled
with himself to the last day
of his exhausted life.
Who loved America, composing
a few lines in the shade
of a plum tree. In his beloved
Italy. His ghosts still rising
and burying themselves.
For what he did and was done
to him. A story, Congressman,
I hope you can take back
to your constituency in Urbana,
your hometown.
Where, you know better
than us, there’s a small house
with artifacts and books,
rumored to be the best place
in the world to spend
an hour learning the truth
about John Chapman, aka
Johnny Appleseed. That myth
of a man. Casting himself
from one side of the river
to the other.
________
Gary Margolis is Emeritus Executive Director of College Mental Health Services at Middlebury College. His third book, “Fire in the Orchard” was nominated for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize Poetry. His latest book “Time Inside” is recently published.
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