What it Means to be Human
Poems about What it Means to be Human.
Teamsters
Now must be the time to make time,
judging from the rapid bump of semis
filling my room. (Having discharged live loads
at Albany are they–at 4 A.M.–
on to loads of cold-rolled sheet?)
At All-Night Stops, in the presumptive day
of mercury vapor you see them circling their rigs,
testing with ballpeen for the "No flat here"
that 18 Firestones better sing:
you overhear them in booths, in the assumed
accent of crackers prolonging
a mythology of getting through.
In shirt tails and shit kickers, awkward
as crabs, no wonder their withdrawal
into the greater identity of cabs.
Atop chrome registers they double clutch
in intricate shifts, feel in gear trains
for the nodes to make this mother move.
Muncie... South Bend ... Kankakee,
on handfuls of speed they test the limits:
Smokey's temper, templates of curves,
tread's griplessness on ice,
the harebrained, hairpin possibilities.
Eating the rinse their mudflaps fling,
I can ignore how they highball our good grief,
what their bumpers say they pay in taxes,
even the menace of their Brotherhood.
Bring our bread with incivility
they may, but (under their seats the proper answer
for highjackers) bring us our bread they do.
John Barr/from The Hundred Fathom Curve New and Collected Poems
Driving In Rain
End of a weekend, going back,
my two tracks sinuate as one.
Skin of rain drawn tight by wind,
the windshield wipers don't keep up.
Posed in this airspace, passing
Purgatory Gulf Pop. 125,
I wonder why observe the limits, why
keep pulling it back
when, let go, it would go
straight for a time,
then wander
off without assumptions,
questioning first the need for road.
John Barr/from The Hundred Fathom Curve
Outage
Our dogs in the sudden silence raise
their heads. Hums of the house gone dead,
the clocks flash 12, the freezer's hold
softens with remembered thaws.
The power grid's ability
to self-excite, the integrity
of a communal whole aborts.
Not everything, of course. A breeze
unbundles the treetops and disports,
the nation of frogs exhorts, exhorts,
and here in the room lungs fill and pause.
I think the end may come this way,
some things in the dark at first
just not going forward as they should.
John Barr / from The Hundred Fathom Curve
The Brotherhood Of Morticians
The story is told of the undertaker
who runs out of formaldehyde
and uses antifreeze instead.
Asked why his costumers look blue,
he says he's made them good
for starting down to ten below.
Let me take that as my text tonight.
We function at the shelving edge between
the dead and living: upstairs receive
the bereft with sympathetic mien,
assist in the ceremonies that release
their grief, maintain decorum
from visitation to the Rest In Peace.
In small ways on this side
of the great divide we add valorem.
Down in the basement we prepare
the departed to deworld: fallen parts
put back, drain cavities, ensure
with needle and formaldehyde
that burial's not premature.
(Only we need to know what's underneath
the suit; we're paid to work alone.)
Death we cannot forestall
for we come after, but the appearance of death,
we do. Not Jekyll, not Hyde, we undertake
to give the grievers back their own.
Not black, our arts are to restore:
toiletries and touch-ups, nails and hair.
Our charges seem to sleep. The wake,
correctly done, is a farewell
"to one who goes before."
Muted organ, muted lights, mute friends:
our insincere sincerity
buffers the bewildered family
from grim specifics of the tragedy.
Pinched in earthquakes, browned in fires,
consumed by cancer's radish,
a coronary's urgent turbulence,
collapsed at tables, choked on bones
(was there ever such savage disregard
as when Death squats, Neanderthal,
on the chest of a dinner guest?),
buckled in showers, felled at urinals.
Good fellows, our associates, Rotarians
who take the jokes as part of the job, who oversee
the motorcade, one stop upstream from Charon's,
the progress to the pit,
the vicarinvokingchrist's last words,
the family not hearing it,
the unaffected cemetery birds.
Or, if cremation's specified, they certify the burn,
entrust to a family friend the urn
to carry south to green reaching waters of the Gulf.
But the lesser in our trade
miss the magnitude of what we do.
We are after all not dressing meat.
Our task: no less than to preside
at a meeting of world and world, a mystery
wherein the person they knew
and some strange double coincide
("It's him, but it's not.").
In one, two worlds epiphany.
They're one of us still, the newly dead,
but lack their spark (that gone
to the parson's charge or who knows where).
The simmer in the brainpan at the body's end
is out. Stiffness invades the supple limbs.
The fresh dead season and dry.
And this is the first life after death.
Roots visit, tendrils touch,
slow solvents work new properties.
Animal, vegetable, mineral,
the dead in grave's grip reach
a dreamless crystalline estate.
A man, become his minerals, salts
away the last of his identity,
seeps to the water table and secretes
trace elements. And that is the next life after death
a foreign stain on the littoral
at the beck of continental drift.
I tell you, World Without End is a statement of geology,
No longer lightning-life dotting the earth, marking divides,
we are returned to the planet's peristaltic beckonings,
welcomed by eons below, included in the crush and flow
of plate on plate, the tectonic thrust,
unimaginably strong and slow,
as continent mounts continent,
the grind, compression, conversion to what is next and new.
John Barr / from The Hundred Fathom Curve
Death of a Species
The earth doesn't need to be saved.... 99 percent of
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