Monday's Poetry: "Elegy for the Forgotten Oldsmobile"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator

I read quite a bit, and fortunately for me there are many writers whose work I enjoy.  One of my favorites is Sherman Alexie, the author of "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," a book which was reviewed in this space yesterday.   Alexie, a Native American who grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpenit, Washington, is also an accomplished poet, and I have used some of his poetry in this space in the past - including "The Theology of Cockroaches" in November of 2009 and "Evolution" in January of 2013.

I had in mind to use another poem by Mr. Alexie today, but while searching through his work, I came across the poem, "Elegy for the Forgotten Oldsmobile" by Adrian C. Louis.  According to several sources, it was the poem that redirected Sherman Alexie's life toward being a writer.

Adrian C. Louis, a Paiute Indian, is a retired professor from the University of Minnesota who currently lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.   His writing voice sounds remarkably like that of Sherman Alexie - or vice versa!

Here is one more view of the world that produced both of these fine poets.

Elegy for the Forgotten Oldsmobile 

by Adrian C. Louis

July 4th and all is Hell.


Outside my shuttered breath the streets bubble


with flame-loined kids in designer jeans


looking for people to rape or razor.


A madman covered with running sores


is on the street corner singing:


O beautiful for spacious skies…


This landscape is far too convenient


to be either real or metaphor.


In an alley behind a 7-11


a Black pimp dressed in Harris tweed


preaches fidelity to two pimply whores


whose skin is white though they aren’t quite.


And crosstown in the sane precincts


of Brown University where I added rage


to Cliff Notes and got two degrees


bearded scientists are stringing words


outside the language inside the guts of atoms


and I don’t know why I’ve come back to visit.

O Uncle Adrian! I’m in the reservation of my mind.


Chicken bones in a cardboard casket


meditate upon the linoleum floor.


Outside my flophouse door stewed


and sinister winos snore in a tragic chorus.

The snowstorm t.v. in the lobby’s their mother.


Outside my window on the jumper’s ledge


ice wraiths shiver and coat my last cans of Bud


though this is summer I don’t know why or where


the souls of Indian sinners fly.


Uncle Adrian, you died last week—cirrhosis.


I still have the photo of you in your Lovelock


letterman’s jacket—two white girls on your arms—


first team All-State halfback in ’45, ’46.

But nothing is static.

I am in the reservation of
my mind.

Embarrassed moths unravel my shorts


thread by thread asserting insectival lust.


I’m a naked locoweed in a city scene.


What are my options?

Why am I back in this city?


When I sing of the American night my lungs billow


Camels astride hacking appeals for cessation.


My mother’s zippo inscribed: “Stewart Indian School—1941”


explodes in my hand in elegy to Dresden Antietam


and Wounded Knee and finally I have come to see


this mad fag nation is dying.


Our ancestors’ murderer is finally dying and I guess


I should be happy and dance with the spirit or project


my regret to my long-lost high school honey


but history has carried me to a place


where she has a daughter older than we were


when we first shared flesh.

She is the one who could not marry me


because of the dark-skin ways in my blood.


Love like that needs no elegy but because


of the baked-prick possibility of the flame lakes of Hell
I

will give one last supper and sacrament


to the dying beast of need disguised as love


on deathrow inside my ribcage.


I have not forgotten the years of midnight hunger


when I could see how the past had guided me


and I cried and held the pillow, muddled


in the melodrama of the quite immature


but anyway, Uncle Adrian…


Here I am in the reservation of my mind


and silence settles forever


the vacancy of this cheap city room.


In the wine darkness my cigarette coal


tints my face with Geronimo’s rage


and I’m in the dry hills with a Winchester


waiting to shoot the lean, learned fools


who taught me to live-think in English.

Uncle Adrian…

to make a long night story short,

you promised to give me your Oldsmobile in 1962.

How come you didn’t?

I could have had some really good times in high school.