On The City Dump by Benjamin Myers
2015-2016 Oklahoma Poet Laureate
by Ken Hada
The City Dump
John Black started digging a grave the morning
his wife ran off to Tulsa with the insurance adjuster;
he dug it by the bare mimosa
overhanging the right-of-way in front
of their low ranch house by the highway,
and he had to chop through sandstone and clay,
hauling up rock bare-headed in the sun
until evening came and he laid himself
down in the hole for two days, watching
the swollen moon chase a frail, lemon sun
across that rectangular patch of sky.
The third day his brother came
and sat beside the grave in a plastic
lawn chair, talked about livestock
and fishing until John, to prove
a point about casting into brush, rose
to get his gear.
| Now he's here, his pickup |
next to Will Miller, who never married
and lives in a house he built from salvage
beside the dirt speedway, lying awake
Friday nights and listening to the cars go
around and around while he thinks of waves
washing over stones on the Pacific shore.
And there's Dave Fox, who went to Vietnam
and came back to teach geometry,
thirty-five years, daily translating the torn children
in burned-out villages
into mathematical precision,
abstracting from the tall and shifting grass
the triangle and the parallel line,
eating perfectly halved peanut-butter
sandwiches in the run-down teacher's lounge.
They are pushing back against the growing junk
of winter – pine needles, busted refrigerators,
broken hoses in all sizes, balding tires –
though they know full well that each blessed year
brings it back and that a man can never
stay ahead for long.
| And sometimes they dream – |
each of them – of the mounds growing beyond
their control, breaking like dark waves
of a midnight sea over their low rows
of houses, over the farms and stalled-out
tractors.
| but, for now, they are at the dump, |
upright in the back of their pickup trucks, cleaning
out long beds with sideways sweep of brown,
rounded work boots, as they kick out the remnants
of their haul, one knee each rising, falling
in a crooked jig above brush piles and sacks of trash,
where the honeyed sunlight drips over truck
hoods onto gravel and a cardinal
is calling from beyond the chain-link fence,
and it is spring,
| and the men are dancing. |
(from Lapse Americana, 2013 New York Quarterly Books)
The poem opens with a series of three character-driven vignettes in each of the first three stanzas. The abbreviated stories of loss, each character traumatized, each surviving but still grieving, carrying haunted memories.
Stanzas four and five shifts from the individual stories, bringing the past into the present, and thus informs the readers what the men are doing, and on a surface level, WHY they are doing what they are doing.
Which, of course, is that they are cleaning out the beds of their pickup trucks. The poem moves toward the concluding stanza where with the "sideways sweep" of their "brown, rounded work boots" are kicking out the "remnants of their haul."
Spring, of course is contrasted with winter, suggesting living with death and necessarily finding a new task for each of the men.
In this spring ritual, they are "pushing back against" the "growing junk of winter," and the mention of "pine needles" suggests the end of Christmas. The tone suggests the bleak realization that they would be overwhelmed were it not for this cleansing ritual. Further, it causes readers to wonder if even Christmas has been disappointing. Certainly, the time of celebration, however it came to these traumatized men, is now over. A new season is necessary for their survival.
These two transitional stanzas suggest the contrasting themes of accumulation and discarding, and prepare for the concluding sixth stanza that will bring us to the wonderful phrase depicting "dancing men."
I envision an awkward choreography observed by the poet who transports everyday duties into an artistic event, albeit an unaware performance by the three grieving men, transformed by the poet into dancers.
The poem playfully turns the dull physical movements into an annual ritual, a subconscious entering into the realm of art. Unaware of their apparent synchronization, their "dancing" is hopefully contrasted with their difficult daily routines described in the first three stanzas.
The poem's climactic line suggests that these men don't understand their own innate beauty that has been overwhelmed, both by accumulated physical objects, as well as the psychological "junk" that yet accompanies them.
Stanzas four and five mentions their troubled sleep, marked by the presence of dreams, filled with "mounds growing beyond their control" indicating the emotional clutter that must be cleaned out, and perhaps started by this spring ritual.
The poem reminds us of the great need to find cleansing rituals, even in the everyday duties of life. If these men could only see themselves as the poet helps us to see them – as dancers, beautifully ironic – at least for a few moments.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Ken Hada is a poet and professor at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma where he has directed the annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival for 20 years. Ken is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including his latest: Visions for the Night (to be released April 3, 2025), and Come Before Winter, from Turning Plow Press. His previous collection, Contour Feathers (Turning Plow Press, 2021) received the Oklahoma Book Award. Other works of his have been awarded by The Western Writers of America, The National Western Heritage Museum, South Central Modern Language Association and The Oklahoma Center for the Book, and featured on "The Writer's Almanac." In addition to his poetry, Ken remains active in scholarship, writing and publishing regularly on regional writing, literary ecology and multicultural literatures. The “Ken Hada Collection” is held at the Western History Collection Library at the University of Oklahoma. Ken Hada: https://kenhada.org/ or khadakhada@gmail.com
FEATURED POET
Benjamin Myers was the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and is the author of four books of poetry, of one book on poetics, and of numerous articles, essays, and reviews. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and literary festivals around the country. Myers is a professor of literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he directs the Great Books Honors Program. https://www.benjaminmyerspoetry.com/
REFERENCES
https://www.lamar.edu/literary-press/genre/poetry/family-book-of-martyrs.html
https://bellepointpress.com/products/ambiguity-and-belonging
