hip talk, loose dreams, songs sung 
in parking lots, songs of the tribe,
schoolbooks laid out on a farm table;
match books, account books, paperback
novels with broken spines; comic books,
coat buttons, bottle rockets, produce sheds,
hardware salesmen, cattle market men,
auctioneers and german bakers; road
surveyors, men who take risks on the
interstate in trucks; summers plunging
off a bridge into a muddy creek, the rust
of railroad tracks returning to the earth;
clamshells, sardine cans, dogs with sad
haunches and mouths swung open
like sliced watermelon; questions
with no answers, horses no one
can ride, a panhandler mooching
through the backyard; a firehouse
plot that thickens; towns, towns
and more towns; men who are
consumed by them, men who
work outdoors in the rain,
bankers and wildcatters
and rodeo boys, tractors
crawling across the horizon
like snails; men with
slouch hats blocking out
the sun, men in barbershops
and women in beauty parlors;
gods that exist in sullen wicked
hearts; concrete which hardens
in the most solemn sets of eyes;
a saloon in every town, a mason
jar, a stump hole, a chicken bone;
a half bottle of rye whiskey left out
on the porch; a wrecked fence; a swing
slung low from a huge old apple tree;
decent men, decent women, children
who come out of nowhere; their silent
faces, their delicate faces, like dew on
flowers, like clay baked in a ferocious
oven; furious, silent, lonely faces,
lonely as flower pots; the silence
of words that remain unspoken,
lives translated out of silence
and back into silence again;
a silence which retains its tragic
simplicity; like music which exists
inside music; the kind of music
that is trapped inside itself
~ George Wallace
George Wallace is adjunct professor at Pace University in NYC and writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace. Author of twenty-five chapbooks, he appeared in 2012 at the Gordon Parks Museum, Pittsburg Library and Prospero‘s Books in Kansas. Other appearances: Woody Guthrie Festival, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, National Steinbeck Center.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 