Portrait of a Lady

At the Thomas Circle CVS
we wait behind a woman with black hair
streaked wildly red,
and a black satin jacket
also streaked—wildly red to match.

Rouge becomes her career. Her face is tired,
soft, and the simple facts are these:
it’s Sunday
morning,
she went down all night,
and now
she’s stopped to buy tissues and peppermints.

As she rifles through her purse, a quarter
clinks on the floor.
A gentleman in his
Sunday brogues and his go-to-God suit
goes down for her:
he picks the quarter up.

For this she smiles at him,
unseductively.

:: Patric Pepper, Temporary Apprehensions (2005)

The Truck Driver's Husband: A Letter

after Ezra Pound, after Rihaku (Li Tai Po)

While Mom was still cropping me crewcut close,
I played around the trailer parks, in jeans
and hot-rod tee shirts, vandalizing all.
You used to swing by—swing your girlish hips—
smack your red lips off cherry Popsicles,
and say that I could just whip the weenie
forever. So we plagued that crazy place,
taunting the neighbors, pissed on and pissed off.

But we were married soon, when you got pregnant.
I was frightened, didn’t laugh for years.
I hired on at Smitty’s Gulf for peanuts—
pumped gas, changed oil, learned how to fix a car.
When you’d come down with Danny on your hip,
I wouldn’t look up from underneath the hood.

At twenty-six I wanted you forever.
Never sorry then, I stared away,
dreamed of the place I’d have with you, the home
where I would die someday, be carried out.

At thirty-eight you got your license, left
to drive a rig from Florida to Maine.
And you’ve been gone twelve months today. The semis
winding out at night still make me think.

I’m sober seven months and painted the house.
I wish you’d seen the garden here this year:
tons of tomatoes, four bushels of beans.
It hurts. I’m sorry now. My beard is peppered.
If you swing past and have some time to talk,
call me, please, and I’ll come out to meet
you, anywhere you like on I-95.

:: Patric Pepper, Temporary Apprehensions (2005)

Maintenance Mechanic

in memory of Slim

Channel-locks repose in his callused hand
like a baby in its mother’s skirted lap;
his other hand welds to a coffee cup
filled with the sweet mud mechanics demand.
I ask about his wife; I understand
she’s in remission now. He sighs; he sips.
It seems to hit his belly with a plop.
“Yeah,” he says, “I ain’t got nothin’ planned.”

What do I envy? His country music? Flat-
top and twang? His many wives? Or his tools?
He’s everything I never thought to be.
I scan his leather face for clues. We chat
about “bootlickers ‘n’ fools.” Forget our souls.
And his sick wife. And bright eternity.

:: Patric Pepper, Temporary Apprehensions (2005)

Paving Parking Lots

Whitman would have loved the asphalt crew
stomping around with caked and oily boots,
bronze-like with tattooed arms rippling from
their sleeves, heroic arms that pull on rakes,
with blackened baseball caps set low against
the blank suspicious stares of boss and sun.

They’re smoke and smell of oil, and glistening black
necks, and fiery red necks, necks of working
guys following Claude the foreman hollering hoarsely
above the engine roar of paving machines,
all of them followed up by No-hat Jack,
who steer his six-ton diesel-driven roller
through billowing noise back and forth just so.

Whitman would have yearned: such godly muscles,
gorgeous shoulders, ordinary faces
sweating before his face, myth come to life,
Skoal and Camels there beside the cooler.
They’re men who know what’s two and two, perhaps
can read a bit. They’re men who’ve never heard
of the great eccentric bard—couldn’t care less—
who take no bows before their audience.

:: Patric Pepper, Temporary Apprehensions (2005)