8th Annual Juried Reading
Finalist
David Bond

David Bond is presently the Manager of Interlibrary Lending at Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois. He has worked at a variety of jobs such as assembler, substitute teacher, newspaper reporter, and a long stretch of seventeen years in the warehouse above an underground coal mine. At age 44 he began work on an MFA from Southern, studying with poets Allison Joseph, Lucia Perillo, and Rodney Jones. David has recently published work in Black Dirt, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Crab Orchard Review, and Clark Street Review, along with a collection of poems titled Colors. A 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship winner in poetry, he has presented programs in the past few years at Binghamton University and The University of Tulsa, investigating the creative force of work and the workplace, emphasizing that not all poets are in academia.

American Chicken
--for Ken

Unsettled, always, my heart; my head
vulnerable to the same two notes
of mistimed history played over and over:

indecision and the untouchable
minutes of regret for a place which
doesn't exist or if it does,

has no room for us anymore, no matter
how beautiful I remember the frozen
shoreline to have been, lake-ice in Whitefish Bay

blazing in a slip of sun, a caesura
of cliff cutting into the elegance of pine,
the shoal of light where sky and mist met;

no matter how ridiculous that parquet suitcase
stickered with what your father called
the footprint of the American chicken.

O Tempora, O Mores, our late Latin teacher whispers.

In the last gasp of decade I drove due north
to a latitude of exile where we drank
nonvintage strawberry wine and you left.

Thirty years later, striding a hypotenuse
of bare earth between two sidewalks here
at the university, I can't explain the times;

Abbie Hoffman high-jumps a velvet aisle
rope in federal court and Old Main
burns boundless in the night like

an ecstatic cult of images because
we did or did not love the Fatherland.
You left; I remained in this frustrating,

illegible country as Robert Plant scat-sang
electric blues and citizens, repelled by
the terrible moment of ideas, declared

it all a crisis of authority. I remember little.
Christians became lions. The universe expanded
or shrunk and on our chunk of earth two policemen

removed badges, beat me in the testicles
to preserve order; a few more runaway stars
blinked out and revolutionaries quietly turned

into stock analysts; I took great delight
in power drinking and the whitenesses of thighs.
Not quite enough for a PBS documentary.

I envy you, old friend, not so much for
your decision, which was logical, natural
as guilt, but for the resolve with which you acted.

As I envy another old friend, wheelchair-bound,
who double-timed into what you fled.
As I envy all those who gained some measure

of self-esteem by the choices they made.
And I guess I want that moment back,
impossible, no, false as it may be

to feel your hand's heat saying goodbye
among the seamless landscape of conceit.
This is about the tension between past and present.

This is about how much it hurts to choose not to choose.


-- David Bond

(C) 2002 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.