[New-Poetry] Democratic Vistas

[David Graham]

Democratic Vistas

The narrator was shot by the sniper he was describing
and I quickly picked up his pen.

What luck, I thought, to be sitting up here in the narrator's
tower where the parking lots look like chalkboards and the characters
scurry around or fall down and die as I design it.

Then I started to read the novel I'd inherited and didn't like
what I discovered.

Most of the characters were relentlessly evil, taken right off the bad
streets of the Bible.

The narrator would interrupt the story at all the wrong times, like a
third wheel on a date, and deliver shaky opinions like "People who
wear turtlenecks must have really fucked-up necks."

He would get lost in pointless investigations, i.e., was Pac-Man an
animal, so that when we returned to the characters many pages
later, their hair had grown past the shoulder and their fingernails
were inches long.

In support of the novel, I must say it was designed well. The scenes
were like rowhouses. They had common sidewalks, through which one
could hear the faint voices and footsteps of what was to come.

I've lived those long driving scenes. Everyone knows how hard it is,
after you've been on the road all day, to stop driving. You go to sleep
and the road runs under the bed like a filmstrip.

I also liked the sheriff's anxious dream sequence, where he keeps
putting a two-inch-high man in jail, and the tiny man keeps walking
out, in between the bars.

After a sleepless night he's awoken by the phone. There's a sniper in
the University tower. The sheriff stands before the bathroom mirror.
Drops of Visine are careening down his face.

They are cold and clear
and I can count them through my rifle scope.

--David Berman.  Actual Air.  Open City Books, 1999.





==========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
==========================================



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