Surfing USA
American City
Pastorale, 3.7
The signs all point to a Golden Age
somewhere behind or ahead but never here
where the roads and fields promise only
eternal summers and winters of monotony
and bird songs always in a minor key.
Here the blighted users curse their modems,
the WiFi leading nowhere but a view
of their smooth unblinking faces on the screen
juggling unsuccessfully with search terms
foiled by their own language at each turn,
blinded by practice to the scrolling ads
crafted with the same exquisite care
with which a fly-fisher drapes a hook with hair
from slaughtered animals, for no release
comes without a prior catch, the moment
when ages and seasons cease their cycles
and the perfection of all our will and wiles,
fashions and styles, are numbers in a bank
proportioned to eyes ever-open, though blank.
It wasn't always and won't always be
munificence stung by catastrophe.
Shadow of the town where I went to school
cracked and empty as an abandoned pool.
Hilltop monument to the city's great
names now unfamiliar. It's getting late.
The old stores crumble under foreign signs
for redolent foods, but the only lines
unwind around the municipal hall,
where mendicants await the clerk's bored call,
summoned by seemingly random numbers
that signal relief, but leave them number.
Wharfs walled around by shuttered warehouses
watching the lake like abandoned spouses
of errant seamen who only now learn
the prosperous ship will never return.
A destination one can believe in
hides behind each hill -- a farm house, a mill,
a placid dell with flatulent cattle.
Then from the crest we see more of the same
cineplexes, gas stations, and dollar stores.
Drivers dismount to engage with workers
standing for their endless needs, and smiling
as per script. Car refueled and body fed,
the road rises beyond for one more look,
and there it is again, but supersized
to mile-long sheds of galvanized steel
vented by roaring fans that damp the sound
of beakless chickens or immobile sows:
the maw for the cloaca that devolves
over the next hill, to the next field of malls.
M. A. Schaffner has had poems published in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Agni, and elsewhere -- most recently in Hermes, Modern Poetry Review, and Pennsylvania Review. Long-ago-published books include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia.
