Plenty
What is wrong with me, he thought. Plenty.
The land of plenty. The sea of plenty. The air of plenty.
—Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream
It has everything to do with fathers and mothers
and how, each day, they hand off disappointment
like lunch money or some caution about the world,
warning as innocuous as to watch crossing streets,
though they know their fears are never our fears.
Maybe because they are immigrants or outsiders,
isolates starting over in places that aren’t home,
though they buy houses in neighborhoods where
CD players spin Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett
and the food smells are a familiar slap in the face.
As their children, we are loved, if we are loved,
for as long as it takes to watch Avatar or Titanic
on a big-screen TV by a fireplace with fake logs
where there’s heat but then nothing to show for it.
And if they believe in God, our beloved parents
wreathed in cigarette smoke and titanic self-doubt,
then that must be our God, especially since smoke
is a perfect metaphor for that which spirals outward.
When we love, later, as adults, they’re in the room.
Women we choose are our mothers in unguarded
moments; men, a father’s rage and something else.
If it has always been this way, then what excuse
could they fashion for not warning us, even once,
how nearly everything about this is myth? America,
all your bankruptcies are blockbuster 3-D movies
about the Rule of Law as the Law of the Jungle
in which bodies flit from tree to doomed tree,
a CGI starship or marvel of the White Star Line
brandishing a Stars & Stripes or a Union Jack.
It has been our bad luck to dream their dream.
We dream it yet. And if our kisses are fires,
they have been fed little for far too long--
they cool quickly, they taste like ashes.
Roy Bentley has won six Ohio Arts Council fellowships, a fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Cleaver among other journals. He is the author of Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama), Any One Man (Bottom Dog Books), The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine Press), and Starlight Taxi (Lynx House Press) which won the 2012 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize. These days, he makes his home in Pataskala, Ohio.
The land of plenty. The sea of plenty. The air of plenty.
—Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream
It has everything to do with fathers and mothers
and how, each day, they hand off disappointment
like lunch money or some caution about the world,
warning as innocuous as to watch crossing streets,
though they know their fears are never our fears.
Maybe because they are immigrants or outsiders,
isolates starting over in places that aren’t home,
though they buy houses in neighborhoods where
CD players spin Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett
and the food smells are a familiar slap in the face.
As their children, we are loved, if we are loved,
for as long as it takes to watch Avatar or Titanic
on a big-screen TV by a fireplace with fake logs
where there’s heat but then nothing to show for it.
And if they believe in God, our beloved parents
wreathed in cigarette smoke and titanic self-doubt,
then that must be our God, especially since smoke
is a perfect metaphor for that which spirals outward.
When we love, later, as adults, they’re in the room.
Women we choose are our mothers in unguarded
moments; men, a father’s rage and something else.
If it has always been this way, then what excuse
could they fashion for not warning us, even once,
how nearly everything about this is myth? America,
all your bankruptcies are blockbuster 3-D movies
about the Rule of Law as the Law of the Jungle
in which bodies flit from tree to doomed tree,
a CGI starship or marvel of the White Star Line
brandishing a Stars & Stripes or a Union Jack.
It has been our bad luck to dream their dream.
We dream it yet. And if our kisses are fires,
they have been fed little for far too long--
they cool quickly, they taste like ashes.
Roy Bentley has won six Ohio Arts Council fellowships, a fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Cleaver among other journals. He is the author of Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama), Any One Man (Bottom Dog Books), The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine Press), and Starlight Taxi (Lynx House Press) which won the 2012 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize. These days, he makes his home in Pataskala, Ohio.