Sample Poems by Steve Lambert

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The Oldest City from the Newest Suburb

We’re so close you can almost smell
the fresh empanadas of St George Street,
hear the echo of 500-year-old cannon fire,
the baying of Spanish whores. Our cookie-cutter
house, built in ’04, is an insult to the ruggedness
of history—our neighborhood, a post-post-modern
graying next to all that rough and garish beauty.
The wholesale violence of conquest next to the
calculated violence of commerce. At least the former
is muscular, of consequence. What McMansion
could possibly outlast El Castillo? Spanish sounds
so familiar to me that it’s just a sexier, less
straightforward, kind of English. Even the drunks
here have impressive bloodlines: Old Europe
not New World. Our small, gray home wouldn’t
withstand a direct hit from a Cat 3. But I would
fire cannons from its rooftop, battle overland
invaders, to secure the small fortress of this drab life.

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The Decline

It’s not Vergil or Homer, but it is
a type of Classicism,
this aversion to scenery-free travel.

Like a dad who does not believe
in the bald efficiency of interstates,
you take promiscuous, gauche, past-her-prime U.S. 1
south passed all the defunct and dilapidated
(“family-owned and operated”) motels and motor lodges,
ruins of 1950s pre-interstate quaintness:

defeated flead-out trick dens, now,
and ghost-roach rooming homes,
equal parts corruption and reclamation.

Robert Johnson CD in the player:
from Memphis to Norfolk is a thirty-six-hour drive.

A flip-flopped hitchhiker in an open shirt
holds a worn-out cardboard sign: “I’ll buy the beer.”
Having no destination, we leave him.

Coral, aqua and citrus-orange wood rot,
either side of us, drifts by amber-hued
in the spring evening. A neon bar sign blinks on.

A Florida decays in real-time, a good backdrop
for our impropriety, for fucking around.
This road was made for fifty-seven Chevys
and flatbed trucks, for a wild, full-bore escape
in whatever beater’s at hand. Your Nissan Sentra is
not as romantic as all of that, but it'll do.

Tall, thin cabbage palms lean away from a nor’easter,
clusters of dense urchin palmettoes shutter,
a sea grape waves its glossy leaves,
a regiment of spindly Florida pines stands at attention,
a long-limbed live oak moves on a languid magnolia.

The obligatory roadside checkmated armadillo
rocks in the wake of cars; turkey buzzards collude
close by. A bombed-out Quonset hut barbeque joint
smolders next to a sooty-looking Jiffy; a Circle K
where day-labor drunks loiter on the side;
a strip mall with nothing in it anymore
but a tiny Pentecostal church,
hand-painted sign above the door:
Holy Ghost Salvation Chapel.

A rare coolness is in the air.
I catch a hint of orange blossoms.
We pass through an Anglo faux Miamito,
a cracker village, by a trailer court named Frog Hollow
where hollering men in coveralls drink canned beer
and throw horseshoes. A lean man leans
into the mouth of a blocked Dodge Charger,
curses the carburetor.

We are not barbarians.
They are not Romans.
Women and children ignore them.
We hear their coarse crooning
through cracked windows. We are attuned to them,
like spirit-drunk charismatics, like a boy
with his ear to a conch shell; we ride
as far as a tank of gas takes us, fill up
and start again; nobody, thank God,
cares what we’re up to.

We pass the occasional family-crammed
sedan or minivan, someone’s Florida-boy dad,
just off work, strong-arming the wheel
of a rusted-out whale. He crests the roller,
half-drank beer between his legs
(five fresh ones in the seat).
He disappears. We keep going.

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Little Egypt
For Glenn

Southern Illinois is Kentucky resigned
to the fact that it is not Kentucky. You
take me to a town named after corn where
there are no cornfields. Everything here
seems like it had to be here, was not enough
for some place else. The hills here are not
majestic, don’t roll. They loiter and slouch
like self-conscious teenagers. Something
beautiful is always around the corner, but
never materializes. A very old Indian sits
on a bench in front of a store that sells
knickknacks and trinkets. Tourist crap.
He is a trinket. We get tourists in Southern
Illinois, you say, but not many. This town
could be called Resignation, but it is not that
self-aware. I ask him to take a picture with me.
I like to help people, he says. His name is
Mongo, or something. He is Cherokee.
I’m too old to be your souvenir, he says.
All I have is this bench and a cave in the
woods. He looks down. These shabby clothes.
I'm sorry, I say. It happens to everyone,
he says. I’ve killed rattlesnakes with my
bare hands. Killed a white man. You look
at me and shake your head. The Earth is Indian,
he says. She will kill us all in due time. We
don’t go in. I feel both here and not here,
like an idea thought better of. You are here,
in Little Egypt, my friend, because it is too
hard for you to be anywhere else.

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Graceland

I.
Summer 1996

We went just to go. It was the last time
we’d do irony together on a large scale.
I remember most of the trip: his grave,
the lone impersonator wondering the
premises who we decided was Elvis
disguised as himself. We fought about
some now lost detail and were quiet for
the duration of the self-guided tour through
the house. In a gift shop you bought a
post card with a photo on it of a very young
Elvis wearing a turtleneck. We agreed it
was a good choice, but didn’t know who
to send it to. That night in our unair-conditioned
room at Admiral Benbow’s we drank from
bowling- pin-sized bottles of malt liquor
and took Polaroids of our glistening faces,
fucked like harried vermin, and smoked
cigarettes, talked until three in the morning
when it finally became cool enough to sleep.
A month or so later, after we’d broken up,
I got a post card in the mail: young Elvis
wearing a turtleneck. On the back you’d
written “What a trip,” just like that.

II.
Winter 1997

Two months into it we took our first road
trip. You had a Ford Tempo and daddy’s
gas card. We took turns driving and got
there quick. The trees flanking the king’s
house were stark and leafless and looked,
you said, like paintings of stark and leafless
trees. A suspicious impersonator (there’s
always an impersonator) skulked about.
The king’s car was kingly, the jets presidential.
“What a guy,” I said. “He was hot,” you
said. That night it snowed, and we took
to the streets. Our Florida clothes were not
enough so we bought knit caps and quilted
flannels at a two-story hardware store on
Beale Street. It was my first snow. I called my
mom. We stayed at a Comfort Inn and drank
cheap red wine and played bastard versions of
poker games. Before we finally went to bed
we walked outside. The snow had stopped.
“You're the only person I know,” you said,
“who has been to Graceland twice.” We went
to bed and quietly, like snow falling, made
love, and nearly fell asleep connected.

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Daydreaming Downtown

In this urban core you fall facedown or float.
There’s no magic in dying.
We all know how to do it.
But being dead must be boring.
Here, where the homeless have the best phones,
hanging up is the same as letting go.
But who do they call?
Who would answer? A mother, maybe.
I haven’t called mine in weeks.
It’s okay, she doesn’t mind.
We’re not phone people.
I need to see your hands,
framing and fanning and flying—
picking up the indigent words and feeding them meaning
—making them sing.
I guess any setting holds some hellishness.
But true Hell is personal.
Death probably shouldn’t be scary, but it is.
An old mad bum says, “Don’t worry.
It’s just gravity letting you go.”
How perfect is that?