Tag Archives: Steven Schroeder

poetry

in a dream

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two days ago, my father,
lost in Chicago he
said, called to ask if
Highway 60 would get you
to Interstate 94. I heard him repeat
the question twice, but I woke up
uneasy before I could answer.

Among the living, Dad was
rarely lost, and I found
it hard to believe he was
lost in my dreaming that night.

I remember trips when he drove and I was
the navigator and the point was
to use the map to choose
the least paved road

we thought the car could handle (and
we thought the car could handle
anything with time
and a patient driver).

My head has been full of maps
as long as I can remember, but I
couldn’t map a dream of my father lost
asking after two big roads that never cross
in the grid settlers etched on the surface of this island.

I have lived a stone’s throw from both roads
where one is named for Woody Guthrie
and the other (between Port Huron
and Montana) for Bishop Ford.

There must be some barely passable gravel road
between them, and I suppose the dream was
some kind of wake up call. They say

Highway 60 ended in Springfield
in 1926, where it met Route 66 (named
by some for Will Rogers) winding as the song says
from Chicago to LA. We used to meet there,
ten hours driving each, halfway between
Amarillo and Chicago.

Anyone who knows maps knows a map
will get you good and lost if it is
nothing but a grid settlers
wear settling on some surface.
It has to be personal. It has to be
about who is here, who is there, what we
mean by we when, whose mind is wandering

where. You can’t let it lie
flat. A statement of fact: We are
people of this generation, bred in at least
modest comfort, looking uncomfortably to the world

we think we
inherited,

the late Bishop of the Church of God
in Christ remembered between the place
the statement was made and the place a woman
who had the good sense to say no twice
long before I was born was
at home.

I remember her now, remember my father
never met a man he didn’t like, Will,
remember the place

I lived on the wild windy plains —
the end of the world, Granny said.

Then we’d sing a song and sing it
again, sit for an hour and not
say a word, imagine

another possible. No,
not unattainable (and — in
the next dream — I say
yes, in a way, yes.)

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poetry

keep the red in

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Funny how one childhood memory
can bring another childhood
to mind. I

remember a precipice we
called Red Shell

and imagine in retrospect
a mishearing of shale somewhere
along the line — though

the evidence of a long ago ocean
in this dry place was never
hard to find. So it was

easy to hear shell for shale,
and there was no doubt about red.

It was on the other side of a barbed wire fence
that marked the edge of the next ranch
over, close to Romero Cemetery,
where Frenchy McCormick lay,

untended then, so always more interesting
than Boot Hill. There were stories
about the rancher next door,
a shotgun, and rock salt
that made climbing through that fence
feel like slipping over the edge of the world
every time. Remembering walking
sideways down the sharp slope
alongside the sheer face of the precipice is
the only way I’ve ever understood
crossing the stream by feeling the stones.

You had to find your feet or slide down
the side of what you’d swear was a mountain
of shattered shale made more red with the blood
that sharp gravel could draw if you lost them. Red

makes me think of the possum
a friend killed there once, the red blood on
red shale, broken, the sadness when
we saw it wasn’t playing
possum. Still

finding my feet,
and it feels like falling
sideways, slow, to keep the red in,
one childhood leading to another between friends.

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poetry

a public thing

Three hours of Plato and you
can bet your bottom dollar I
found a way to Zappa before we
got to the end of the second book.

Mind wide open, missed the bus at Wacker
and ended up in Sweetwater
asking why in God’s name Shiner
Bock is listed with stouts and porters.

Didn’t miss it exactly — driver
just didn’t want to risk
letting the little bit of cold
traveling with me on board. So

he pulled away without opening the door.
I tell the waitress I’m a native Texan
and I know shinerbock is no…

she says I know I know I’m from New Mexico.

Thinking neutral territory, I pass over
everything from Antwerp to Kalamazoo
and settle on a Colorado milk stout —

come to find out when she comes back and I say I
forgot to ask the most important question
that she is from Alamogordo.

I talk White Sands, Mescalero, tell her I grew up on
the edge in Oldham County and lived in Santa Fe.
Turns out she got married there and doesn’t
have anything against Texans. She says

I see you’re a writer, and conversation
waltzes across Texas to Amarillo, then on
through Sweetwater south to Austin. Weird

how mind goes. I sat down to think
flowers in crannied walls, universes
in grains of sand, flocks of pigeons rising
to see Shanghai whole, cranes leaving
lonely towers empty when they fly

and stumbled on Amarillo cold Chicago
streets so much closer to home because
the driver kept the door closed and I stopped
for a beer while I chose not to kill time stuttering

with me waiting for a train.

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poetry

unthinkable

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Two bridges rise from the Hudson today,
calm after the wind and snow of the day
before. Knowing the way water remembers
they go on when the river ends — over
soil rich with memory’s leavings. They
settle above the line of a hundred year
flood. The one intended to survive an
unthinkable war has turned to consider
the rust red other imagining a train
it will not stop believing the last word
long after crowds have learned to begin
every journey without putting a foot down,
to cross rivers wider than this without once
touching the ground. No track. No sound. No trace.

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poetry

Position Title: Philosophy Instructor

essential physical demands

read. analyze. interpret. apply.
respond to common inquiries.

read. write. speak. hear.
add. subtract. divide. multiply.

perform. define.
collect. establish

facts. draw conclusions.
interpret. speculate. design

future outcomes from known
and unknown. deal. address

situations. face problems.
meet challenges. formulate solutions.

the employee is frequently required to stand,
to walk, to use fingers and hands

the employee is occasionally required to sit,
to reach with hands and arms

the employee must occasionally lift and/or
move. the employee must occasionally lift and/

or move with both hands, arms open.

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poetry

weather

the ragged edge of a storm
undeniable as the ocean

between us every way
i turn paints the sky

this morning
unsettling settling

on a great wind always
brooding on the face of some deep,

on a great bird, mind flying
when the seas are heaving, on

the laughter of a cicada dreaming
the voice of the turtle, rising

ninety thousand miles on
the spiral of a ram’s horn,

where do you think you are
going? a hop and a skip

unsettles the ocean
and that is as high

as anyone can fly,
from one breath to another

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poetry

the epic opposite

Sky so big it needs the whole earth
to lie down on. Paper said chance of rain
today and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
but thin high clouds say not likely, not
today. River is out of sight,
but it has broken flat
into high mesas and deep arroyos
trailing down down to where you
would think water would be. A field of maize is
green in the middle of ocher that shades
from white through the color of alfalfa flowers
to brown as brown as earth and gold
as gold as wheat at harvest time.
Mennonite Church on the edge of Perryton
reminds me the opposite of a war story
is an epic about farming.

Conversation where I stop is Texas
Tech football, sounds like something
a zen master might say: Tech is better than
people think. They haven’t played
nobody but they’ve beat three nobodies
convincingly. A word or two about
growing up here, then the conversation turns
to banks. Guy at the table says
he’s thinking about buying another one.

Owner of the coffee shop in Dodge City
offers me a fly swatter, talks about the oil boom
when I ask where all the traffic on
Wyatt Earp Boulevard is headed. I say
hope that works out. The problem with booms
is bust and he goes off on football players
salaries, says it’s all about managing money,
and I wonder what would be the epic opposite that.

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poetry

going through the motions


the cyclist who says howdy just after
he’s passed to fulfill an obligation
but reduce the likelihood my reply
will add the burden of conversation
with a stranger
                           (i understand his desire
not to be diverted, nod though I know
he can’t see me)
                             the metal bridge clanking
all the way across this side of the Mississippi
when a bicycle whizzes by, and
the first time i turn to be sure
a truck hasn’t stumbled
onto the walkway
                              the waves
the waves the waves on rocks below
the river moving the cry of a gull
the memory fresh in my ears
of a train that sang its passing
as i stepped out to walk the river
and i am suspended now above it all
until i turn and put my foot down
on solid ground
                           make my way
to the Blue Cat for a Mississippi Mocha
Coffee Stout the last of this day’s sun
in and out of clouds on the horizon
night’s slow rising

Rock Island, Illinois, August 2012

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