The Paddock Review

Plumbing

 

I had to wonder, standing on a cement embankment

Of a dredged canal on a gray British day near Victoria Square, 

That if this wasn’t what the city of his birth looked like before 

It was bombed to smithereens by the Luftwaffe of the Nazis,

With shopping arcades, apartment towers, and pubs that serve

Fish and chips, vegan shepherd’s pie, and mushroom burgers

On the foundations of the ruins of the numerous mills, 

Then how much uglier could Birmingham have been 

When W.H. Auden, the founding former director 

Of the Age of Anxiety—who sat, on the first of September,

In 1939, “uncertain and afraid,” in a dive on 52^nd Street

In New York City, on the eve of the Second World War

Across the pond in Europe—was growing up here, the privileged 

But conscientious son of some established professor 

Of technology or other, and a public poet of no small significance 

Who, not coincidentally, given the city’s industrial history, 

Was socialist in response to the problems of modernity, including 

The blatant exploitation of workers, the dominion 

Of corporate bureaucracy, and the specter of mass poverty 

That had haunted him since the collapse of the global economy, 

Once “the rhetorician’s lie/Burst like a pipe” in him, as he said
It had in Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of the Symbolist 

Late nineteenth century, in the only convincing comparison 

Between plumbing and poetry that I have ever come across.

….

This poem first appeared in The Common Ground Review, and is found in the book Above the Fold by Scott Ruescher (Finishing Line Press) at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/above-the-fold-by-scott-ruescher/

Above the Fold takes the reader along for vicarious experiences of sundry places in the author’s native Central Ohio and his adopted New England, in Appalachia and the Deep South, and in various regions of Latin America and England. Whether peeking over the side of a hairpin turn on a mountain road in Kentucky, encountering a flower vendor on a roadside in Colombia, or looking through the window of a one-room schoolhouse in New Hampshire, these storytelling poems explore not just the visible attributes and histories of places, but the lives of people who have inhabited them, in effect making public landmarks of even the most obscure locations. At the core of these poems is an inquisitive love of adventure, a sympathetic and amused curiosity about places and people, and an urge to use the imagination, in a heightened state of verbal awareness, to salvage experience.