The First Poem

It doesn’t matter what you felt
when you hit your toe on that green chair.
It doesn’t bother anyone to think
about you when you come upon the clipping
that fell from your knife
four Julys ago when the apartment
was so close you nearly passed out
while cutting those legs at the collage table.

The helicopter pilot is not concerned
that your understanding of the drop zone
is too oblong and sloped for any sort
of decent landing.

Your son is not affected by the cleanliness
you feel when you pack up the sketchbooks
and art supplies and put all the boxes of them
into his room.

No one has read the book you wrote
about the time in the White House
when you heard the one man swear to the other man
that the thing is supposed to be the way we want it
and not the way we say it is.

And the book you want to write about basketball
and the one about the highway
and the one about the world-travelling gun
doesn’t mean much to the jacks plunging down the shafts
to extract minerals,
and they surely are not moved by the poems
about clean air and clean water, or the teak benches
in a tall grass lot
hiding God knows how many empty cans
and how much mercury.

God knows he can count on you to know
that you don’t know anything about the storyline
with the locusts and the floating baby.  

You may not be concerned with the television show
about the people trying to be kings or kill kings,
and the thing with the single guy picking a wife
may as well be Road Warrior Animal
watching Road Warrior Hawk go off the top rope
to elbow smash Bobby Eaton in the face
while his partner Dennis Condrey
and eight thousand wrestling fans
bring the civic center into a rattle
of thumps and chairs.

Your memories pass in front of your loved people
the way the Dodges and Fords and Chevies
ffffff-ed past the porch of the grandmother’s sister
who fried the better chicken.  

It doesn’t matter about the egos or the yet-to-comes,
what-you-thinks or how-they-react.

Very little concern for what the temperature is outside
for when you can stand up and walk to the door, open it,
and feel the feeling of what is right now on your face
and moving through you, as if you were there and not there,
flickering in form on whether to make the day at home or away.

Worthy Evans is a communications specialist for a Medicare Contractor and part-time sports reporter for the Blythewood Voice, just for the right to visit a ballgame, make tick marks on a sheet, talk to coaches about the good and bad times, and go home to tell the world just exactly what it was he saw. In the pandemic, he grieves, and revels in sparrow songs outside the window of a house that isn't an apartment, while everyone else inside sleeps. Sometimes he reads, if the dog and the sons and his beloved wife allow it. One day maybe he will go back to school. He wrote two books, Green Revolver (University of South Carolina Press, 2010) and Cold War (Third Lung Press, 2018) and is trying not to weigh 400 pounds.