International Poetry Competition
Grand Prize Winner: 1997
Paper Drive
by George O’Connell
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Relax!
Home Pond
Set out at suburban curbs
on a May morning, the sacks and cubes
of words nobody wanted, or thought to turn
to knots and camps, the cookouts
where we’d learn to name the leaves,
the codes, and be prepared
Americans. We rode behind the cabs
of borrowed stakebeds, the Saturday sun,
the wind bright on our Tenderfoot faces,
at the wheel Uncle Joe and old man Holtzman.
Their gentilities worn thin
by Salerno and the Rhine,
they’d shown us more than once
what counted, how for instance
when you carried what you ate
a spoon was all the silver you needed.
The Tribs and Lifes and Cosmos piled up
and soon we stacked ourselves seats
from decades of print, some dank
or deckled with gnawing,
the slick Geographics
bad sliders, but touched with dusky,
tropic breasts always pointing
toward the center of some circle
or a fire.
Sometimes a crew might luck out
with real cheesecake—a Swank or Gent or Cavalier,
once a ten pound bale of Playboys
tied twine-
and topped with a lid of Looks.
Then we’d sit silent, at the burning heart of things
our own fair hearts a little stunned,
surrounded by crime, advice, the digests
of ten thousand thoughts, the wars,
the wares of profit and its loss.
By late afternoon, the trucks would be bowling
down Northwest Highway
toward sunset and the rail spur,
stray pages tearing off in the wind,
our hands already stung with cuts, the smudge
and slices of a million words,
a world still waiting
for its tonnage to be pulped
and bleached and laid out smooth,
as if everything we’d shove in those boxcars
could pass to something else, the one good deed
to pull it all straight
in a paddle stroke,
the ten mile hike down the sandy trail,
some badge or patch or merit,
the whole shaky story looped in the palm
and turned to something clean:
sheepshank, bowline, running hitch,
the truth of what slips
under tension, and what holds.
Poetry Contest