Water Everywhere

Hank Williams’ Dog
Evel Knievel vs. The Snake River Canyon
The Black Sleep
The Memory Medicine Show
Dishes
Water Everywhere

Hank Williams’ Dog

Hank Williams had a dog he brought with him
touring the small towns and the lost highways
to the bars and cheap halls of America
forty years ago. Hank Williams’ Dog
lived the life of Hank Williams, getting in fights
in alleys, getting drunk and stumbling on
across the country to perform.
On a hot night in Tennessee,
the dog outdrank his passed out owner
and veered out the door, off the porch,
tripped down the gulley, unconscious
and into the open arms of a cold river
current running to the sea.




Evel Knievel vs. The Snake River Canyon

Every bone in Evel’s body
has been broken
starting as a boy
in circuses
jumping cars
on motorcycles

A thousand
human things
he’s traveled over

Now it’s nature
against the best
mankind can offer
Snake River Canyon
is a dare to him
opens its mouth
to laugh at him

Rocket motors
red white and blue
he leaves the ground
like a trip to the Moon
but something goes
wrong when he goes up

After all the tv time
sponsored by beer
and watched by millions
Hero Fever
instead of going across
the river
Evel goes straight up
like a firework
and comes down
by parachute
into the river below

Falling slowly
like anybody
Evel Knievel failed




The Black Sleep

Downtown there are holes
in the avenues
where all the poverty
falls in and fills
the underground
The dark tunnels
are not lighted
by electricity or warm
and noone in America
needs to worry about
them




The Memory Medicine Show

The Memory Medicine
was bottled in glass jars
and sold to those people
you see in old photographs
of the American Wild West.
He had a stagecoach
painted with signs
to sell them medicine by.
Empty jars filled the back
and when he needed
more medicine to sell
he stopped at the local river
and filled the jars with water




Dishes

See how she lives, now that it’s Christmas
and the lights are strung across the roof.
Her house blinks with colored lightbulbs
and it makes all the satellite dishes
on her roof seem to jump. I walk past
at night on my way home from work,
after long hours of the assembly line.
It’s a relief to see something out of
the ordinary. I just can’t understand
her need for so many satellite dishes
unless she is the eyes and ears
of the world.




Water Everywhere

More television disasters
of falling rain
as if this is the worst
that has ever been
as if water
was invented
in large quantities
for the 11 o’clock news

Like the paint
of something old
like the rust
underneath
that shows through
when water has
washed across,
everything is given
motion again
when it rains



writing: allen frost in 1990