Sample Poems by Allen Hoey
Country Music
Mothers and dogs die, and fathers too; in the fullness of time
they all do. Wives and husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, and lovers
run away or break your heart. Someday, someone will smash
your car, your truck, whether it’s some dumb-ass in an SUV
or only a deer whose trajectory through life has the misfortune
of intersecting yours a few feet this side of the shoulder—
crumpled fender, bent frame, or just a broken headlight, your baby
ain’t the same, and, even apart from the increase you know
your premium will reflect the next time the bill comes due,
it hurts. At some point in your life, unless you’re someone
I’d never want to sit next to and sip a beer, you’ve felt
a little sad and maybe lonely when you’ve heard a train whistle
keening through the trees on a dark October night. At three o’clock
the wind batters rain against the bedroom window, debris
from the porch roof clatters on the pane, and you lie awake
thinking about how years ago you might have done something
different than the way you did it and rehearsing the many ways
your life might’ve changed. But would you give up the feeling
you get listening to the slow breath beside you, reassuring,
keeping you in bed when part of you wants to get up, get
the bottle and sit at the kitchen table with only a smudge of light
coming in from the one lamp you’ve switched on in the living room,
listening to that wind, those twigs and branches racketing
against the glass and clapboard—would you, could you
be any happier, really? A piece of pie, maybe, some stale
remnants of a birthday cake. Instead, you lie in bed, hear
the faint strains of a fiddle, the twang of a Telecaster,
and in the wind the wailing sound of a pedal steel guitar,
all of this put to music—this life you’ve maybe lived.
Lords of Life
Once I seen a rat bigger than a Pekinese, I
swear to Christ. It was just after I graduated
high school, so late June, I guess, and Jake
and me decided to go camping, just us two,
overnight, so we packed up a change of clothes,
our sleeping bags, brought along some pot,
of course, and a couple of bottles of cheap
wine because, seventeen, we didn’t have a clue.
We found a place where there was a lot of flat rocks,
and we brushed the pebbles away, and laid out
our bags, then set to gathering whatever wood
we could find against the darkness we knew would
sooner or later drop on us like a tapestry, all the stars
so bright, the place so far away from the cities and villages
that their lights weren’t even a blur on the horizon,
and that’s when we saw the rat. God knows why it
crept into the glow of the fire, but we was eating
canned Chef Boyardee ravioli we’d heated on the fire
when we saw the thing. I mean, sure, we’d already
toked-up and left one dead soldier, but we both
saw the same damn thing, so we ruled out anything
except that thing was there. We sat frozen, staring
at it while it stared back at us until Jake got spooked
and tossed a chunk of kindling at it and it ran off
into the tall grass, and we never seen it again that night,
but that ain’t really the story, only a kind of highlight.
We kept feeding dry wood into the fire and sat on our
sleeping bags and passed back and forth the joint and bottle
of Boone’s Farm Apple, a regular rhythm, but then we got
bored just sitting there and decided in all the accumulated
wisdom of our years that we’d wander off into the dark
though neither one of us thought to bring along a flashlight,
we just hid the bottle of wine behind some rocks and took
the pot with us, and we wandered into a swamp we didn’t
either of us suspect was there until first me, then Jake
went up to our ankles in muddy water, just great,
but we forgot about it and kept slogging through the swamp,
not really keeping track of where we was going and how
we might possibly find our way back to where we’d left
our gear and the fire burning, but through to the other side
we found some train tracks, and we started walking the line until
we felt the vibration in the rails, then the sleepers trembling,
and we got off the tracks onto the cinder and waited till we saw
the locomotive’s headlight glaring through the dark, drowning out
the spring peepers and blinding us as it slowed around the curve,
and I don’t think either of us traded a word, maybe a glance
and a nod, and when the boxcars rolled by, we lit out
at a good run—both of us ran track, I guess I ought to say,
Jake the hundred-yard dash and me the half mile, so he
got a little acceleration on me—but we run and jumped,
Jake first and then me, and we caught the ladder, the rungs
biting into our palms, and climbed up to the top and lay
flat out and let the wind pour like cold water over us
and looked up at the stars and laughed like we wouldn’t,
not never ever, grow old and die, like we were the everlasting
lords of life and wanted the whole damn world to know.
Good As I Once Was
At the doorstep of my memory, thirty-five years ago or more,
my world was assembled out of bars. Work in the dormitory
dining halls consumed upwards of forty hours a week, homework
the time I was willing to concede it, sleep nearly an afterthought
after spending the night in a bar. I wasn’t tested on the things
I put my energy toward—and my GPA reflected this failure—
but I tipped back twenty-one shots of rail whiskey and maybe
seven or eight beers besides, and somehow found my way to the dorm,
though, in truth, I puked and was glad that the custodial staff
cleaned the men’s room—I knew I couldn’t—still, at 6 am
I was ready for work, a little the worse for wear, for sure,
but somewhat standing, however askew, and able, once
I drained three mugs of tar-black coffee, to empty the stock
into plastic buckets and lug them to the freezer, then climb inside
the pots and scour them clean, not once letting loose
a dribble of puke—a few belches that stunk up the hollows
of the pots and made me back out for a moment’s air,
but I made it through. Large and with a bushy beard, I earned
the nickname “Gentle Ben,” and, though I didn’t start
any fights, I finished a few. I leaped once on a table and recited
Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” or so I’m told though I’ve got
no reason to doubt my source, a friend with whom, after a long
night of drinking in Norwood, I sat on the roof of a building
I can’t recall quite how we found our way to, and we watched
the sun rise over the antennae prickled from the tops of other
buildings clear to where the autumn leaves began to show
their color in the rising sun. These days, I rarely drink through
until the sun brightens the horizon and sets the motes
afire in the room. Not that I don’t have it in me
the occasional night, say twice a year, maybe three times, it’s just
the feeling doesn’t move me all that often, and I’ve got to
watch my drinking with the plethora of pills I take each night
to combat insomnia, miscellaneous psychological imbalance,
and the after-effects of my heart attack, slight though it was
in the trans-cosmic scheme of things. Four stents and I
went home a day after the last was implanted, a little
ragged around the edges but revved up to see me through
another decade, maybe longer, before they need to replace
those little steel outfits in my arteries or deal the larger hand
if another blow-out, bigger this time, takes me down. I can still,
if I’ve got the mind, move large objects with but a little coaxing,
like the time two summers ago I put in irregular bluestone slabs
to make a patio or last year when I juggled a loaded car-top
carrier out of the stall and fished out a tent and sleeping bags.
Don’t expect it every day, though. I’m well past the doorstep
and more times than not looking for a comfortable place to sit
to watch the dust motes glimmer in the morning sun and all
the leaves on Bowman’s Hill flare their moment’s glory.
Slow Fatigue
I remember the coffeepot Joe-Anne kept simmering on the stove,
and the typed drafts of poems by the young poet next door
her nine-year-old son retrieved from the trash and we read
despite knowing we violated a sacred privacy, and the night,
after she phoned, I snuck up the back stairs while another
young writer stood outside her front door, crying and kicking
a contact-papered dresser into pieces we found the next morning
strewn around the corridor and dragged all the way down the stairs
to the street—a friend of mine she hoped I could quiet, she whispered
while he ranted, otherwise she’d have to call the police, which she
had to do another night, but this time, going back out and around,
I managed to talk him into leaving, and all the other nights we sat up,
drinking her thick, strong coffee, talking about the poems we loved
and arguing over those we hated, reading them, line by line, with all
the conviction our voices wired by caffeine and passion could muster,
standing sometimes to pace off the energy, as though to demonstrate
the inherent beauty in a single line we would, each of us, go to the mat for
—no, beyond that, face God’s own tribunal and the threat of that worst
ring of hell we’d read about last week in Dante, where Ugolino
gnaws your skull for eternity—to prove that beauty to just one other ear
would refurbish each worn and sordid surface of the world in rapidly
emanating waves from the mug we clutched, and the way Joe-Anne,
her voice quavering, would tease her hair, winding the strands around
a finger and feathering them out with her other hand while she insisted
that “tic” gave absolutely the wrong image in this line and, no,
“spasm” wouldn’t do either, the sound just didn’t work,
and the idea I argued, her son curled beside her on the couch,
wakened by a nightmare and sleeping there for the past two hours,
that love, merely loving someone, whether you said it or not,
was not enough to salvage the world lost to slow fatigue—
time, indifference, the sheer wear caused by freezing and thawing
over years of lovers, children, and work—that mothers, in houses
spread farther than the last city lights we could see glimmering in that
last dark before dawn, were already up, making sandwiches, packing
lunches with fruit and juice, packing them with all the careful love
of routine, then to toss their children from dreams into a world
pervaded by the smell of coffee, dress them, and bundle them
out into skeins of fog that unraveled down the streets,
brightly decked parcels for the buses to pluck and muscle away,
and the mornings I would haul down the stairs and clamber
behind the wheel, the sky to the east flushed salmon,
and drive down into that valley where the street lamps switched off.
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