Tyson West
Youngstown Motel
Gasping for air between drops of falling soot
My muse crawled from the water
Of the Shenango dripping algae strands like some
Bucolic creature from our white lagoon –
Posing on the stairwells at Penn Junior High
We had been trying on the affect of our lengthening bodies’ assigned parts.
That afternoon long after the cherry blossoms fled and
Locust and elderberry sorted out their blooms
Lucy’s surgeon father, Dr. Frank, drove his white Cadillac Biarritz westward
From our pastoral of box cars and deer hunting dreams
To the seedy Youngstown motel
Where the clerk must have figured
He was meeting someone else’s wife.
At Mrs. Fair’s Latin class
I had been trying to translate Lucy’s deep blue eyes
I had fooled myself into thinking were violet
Behind her milk bottle glasses
Below the thick dark brows my imagination,
Like the boys at hair and makeup, morphed
Into a flash of Elizabeth Taylor.
As I struggled to conjugate her thinning waist line and swelling breasts
She glanced once at me then
Blushed to divisa Gallia in partes tres.
Even confronting the school year’s end
We were both too nerdly shy to speak.
Our fathers’ greying hair plotted to place us where we breathed and
To wrap our bones in fabrics our mothers selected –
Fifty’s fathers whose Eisenhower jackets or sailor hats
Had become children’s attic play things –
While they drudged in some obscure office, workshop, or store
Burgeoning the mortification of their hours into hifis
Oldsmobile station wagons, diapers and taffeta skirts.
Sure, they saved some of their silver
For Lucky Strikes and Duquesne long necks
Or, if the occasion hardened to a diamond point – Seagram’s Seven.
My dad wore his dorky bowtie to read X-rays of lung cancers, broken bones and bad backs from the foundry
Lucy’s dad cut miracles in some ethereal OR where no one spoke of patients who died.
No block of sunlight was ever entirely their own.
As the bell ground out its buzz for our cake walk to our next class
I caught my last blush of Lucy’s inner thigh when we shifted off our hard-wooden seats.
Ghosting that school year’s last days
Lucy vanished as a mid-summer night dream.
Eventually I pieced my parents’ whispers together
When they thought us kids had passed beyond ear shot –
Dr. Frank split with a steel syringe and lethal elixir
Laid himself out neatly on the shoddy motel bed
To leave his demons but no note to Lucy and her mom to figure.
At least he cared enough to let strangers find his cadaver
Still handsome as the world would have Lucy
Been beautiful with the right slices from a steady eye.
I rode Lycidas to the river that summer for the first time
To the grotto of never knowing
Why Dr. Frank dived so deep to desert our sacred oak grove
And ground hogs compelling Lucy’s and her mother’s suttee.
His passing birthed my passion to cradle his daughter
Lost to us both in the web of metered words that have flowed from me ever since
Words in matrices that will never mean as much to her as her father’s last words
Or the epitaph written by his angry widow did to Dr. Frank.
My muse crawled from the water
Of the Shenango dripping algae strands like some
Bucolic creature from our white lagoon –
Posing on the stairwells at Penn Junior High
We had been trying on the affect of our lengthening bodies’ assigned parts.
That afternoon long after the cherry blossoms fled and
Locust and elderberry sorted out their blooms
Lucy’s surgeon father, Dr. Frank, drove his white Cadillac Biarritz westward
From our pastoral of box cars and deer hunting dreams
To the seedy Youngstown motel
Where the clerk must have figured
He was meeting someone else’s wife.
At Mrs. Fair’s Latin class
I had been trying to translate Lucy’s deep blue eyes
I had fooled myself into thinking were violet
Behind her milk bottle glasses
Below the thick dark brows my imagination,
Like the boys at hair and makeup, morphed
Into a flash of Elizabeth Taylor.
As I struggled to conjugate her thinning waist line and swelling breasts
She glanced once at me then
Blushed to divisa Gallia in partes tres.
Even confronting the school year’s end
We were both too nerdly shy to speak.
Our fathers’ greying hair plotted to place us where we breathed and
To wrap our bones in fabrics our mothers selected –
Fifty’s fathers whose Eisenhower jackets or sailor hats
Had become children’s attic play things –
While they drudged in some obscure office, workshop, or store
Burgeoning the mortification of their hours into hifis
Oldsmobile station wagons, diapers and taffeta skirts.
Sure, they saved some of their silver
For Lucky Strikes and Duquesne long necks
Or, if the occasion hardened to a diamond point – Seagram’s Seven.
My dad wore his dorky bowtie to read X-rays of lung cancers, broken bones and bad backs from the foundry
Lucy’s dad cut miracles in some ethereal OR where no one spoke of patients who died.
No block of sunlight was ever entirely their own.
As the bell ground out its buzz for our cake walk to our next class
I caught my last blush of Lucy’s inner thigh when we shifted off our hard-wooden seats.
Ghosting that school year’s last days
Lucy vanished as a mid-summer night dream.
Eventually I pieced my parents’ whispers together
When they thought us kids had passed beyond ear shot –
Dr. Frank split with a steel syringe and lethal elixir
Laid himself out neatly on the shoddy motel bed
To leave his demons but no note to Lucy and her mom to figure.
At least he cared enough to let strangers find his cadaver
Still handsome as the world would have Lucy
Been beautiful with the right slices from a steady eye.
I rode Lycidas to the river that summer for the first time
To the grotto of never knowing
Why Dr. Frank dived so deep to desert our sacred oak grove
And ground hogs compelling Lucy’s and her mother’s suttee.
His passing birthed my passion to cradle his daughter
Lost to us both in the web of metered words that have flowed from me ever since
Words in matrices that will never mean as much to her as her father’s last words
Or the epitaph written by his angry widow did to Dr. Frank.
Biography
Tyson West has published a lot of poetry, including haiku, traditional western poetry, free verse and experimental poetry and form verse and had two of his poems were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. His Steampunk short story, “The Wulver”, was published in Voluted Tales and “The Thirteenth Victim”, a vampire short story was included in an anthology called “You Can’t Kill Me I’m Already Dead”. He received third place for the Second Annual Kalanithi award in 2018 for his rondel “Under the Bridge”.
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