Pares cum Paribus Nº 4: Índice - Facultad de Ciencias Sociales ...

UNIVERSITY OF CHILE
FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
Robert Hill Long
PARES CUM PARIBUS No. 4
FALL-WINTER 1997
Walking to Manhattan
Out from a brick ranch house bounded by squash fields,
in lint-colored hat, high heels and ankle-length coat
cut possibly from a roll of tarnished silver foil, a stout woman
strides--farm wife's wide double-chinned face aimed past
the winter vegetable miles that are heart and soul of Hadley,
Massachussetts--and makes a hard left onto Route 47 south
where I slow my car to see nothing local
worthy of her well-furred hairdo and metallic sheath:
not the mom and pop store that squats by the dam
or the clapboard church where mice hunt bits of stale God-wafer;
she's not out to impress the five million carrots of Hatfield
and as for Bub's Bar-B-Q and the New Polish-American Tavern
forget it, she's gone, she's walking to Manhattan,
leaving farm-husband dumped in his mangy recliner
mind full of sports announcers, fanbelts and pesticides,
face like a wilted turnip chewed by brown beetles,
leaving one teenager to jack off in a lapful of horror comics
and the other to finish squash inventory in the barn.
The whole unflashy family spread shrinks step by step
as she shrinks in my rearview mirror to a shiny speck
primed to parade through galleries on West 57th: in her mind
maybe she's already transformed Hadley's two-lane blacktop
into Broadway where at each click of her heels men jerk
sunglasses off and taxis honk for a piece of her attention
but there are SoHo champagne openings to wade through,
brilliant painters and dancers and tenors and writers
who lie depressed and obscure as bulbs in sawdust
only for her to discover and lift up and let blossom,
plus the matter of jewels and fur and the right address