Gloria - Drivers at the Short-Time Motel

Table of Contents

PENGUIN BOOKS

DRIVERS AT THE SHORT-TIME MOTEL

Eugene Gloria was born in Manila, Philippines, and was raised in San Francisco. He was educated at San Francisco State University, Miami University of Ohio, and the University of Oregon. Gloria received a Fulbright Fellowship in 1992, an artist grant from the San Francisco Art Commission in 1995, 96 Inc.s Bruce P Rossley Literary Award, and the Poetry Society of Americas George Bogin Memorial Award. He was a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He lives with his wife, Karen, and teaches at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five poetry books annually through participating publishers. Publication is funded by the late James Michener, the Copernicus Society of America, Edward J. Piszek, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

1999 COMPETITION WINNERS

Tenaya Darlington of Wisconsin, Madame Deluxe
Chosen by Lawson Inada, to be published by Coffee House Press

Eugene Gloria of Massachusetts, Drivers at the Short-Time Motel
Chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa, to be published by Penguin Books

Corey Marks of Texas, Renunciation
Chosen by Philip Levine, to be published by University of Illinois Press

Dionisio Martinez of Florida, Climbing Back
Chosen by Jorie Graham, to be published by W.W.Norton

Standard Schaefer of California, Nova
Chosen by Nick Piombino, to be published by Sun & Moon Press

William Carlos Williams

After we make love, I teach you
words Im slowly forgetting,
names for hands, breast, hair, and river.
And in the telling, I find myself
astonished, recalling the music
in my grandmothers words
before she left this world
words you dont forget, like a mandate
from heaven. She said, Its in the act
of cleansing that we kill the spirit
ourselves; every cultures worst enemy
is its own people.

And so I teach you, to remind
myself what it means when I say,
hali ka rito, come here, tell me
the names for ocean, stars, river,
and sunand you tell me
what you remember from the moments
in which the telling arose. You say
hair instead of river; you say breasts
instead of hands; you say
cock and cunt
instead of moon, sea, and stars.

From Mobil Gas he emerges
like a Mack truck from the desert horizon.
You might think of bluefin tunas
coursing the algid sea.
A man with a singular purpose
always walks with his best foot forward
leans into dusk, moon heavy on his back.
Mauricio has punched out at the station.
If you happen to see him
you might remark on the butterflies
the small cloud of yellow, speckled wings
fluttering like wayward kites around him.
You might even reconsider
your faith in miracles,
your capacity
to comprehend the mystery.
You could be going to the market
and have already made a list.
You could be as still as a tinsel tree
illuminated by a spinning color wheel
in a room of immobile silhouettes.
You could have your face
pressed against the windowpane
your chest, a bodiless blouse
and puffy as our Winter faces.
You could be standing in a living room
full of boxes with your fears in tight little bundles.
You could be Mauricio Babilonia
on his way to a rendezvous, his hands
cracked and stained with axle grease,
black as the night gathering at his feet.
And butterflies, impossible and constant,
brushing against his cheeks
like a hundred kisses, the papery wings
of golden monarchs calligraphed
with untranslatable sonnets for one Mauricio Babilonia
on his way to meet his love behind a wall
he will climb, but not fast enough
for the bullet that would seek out his heart.

When the soul selects her own society,
she gathers herself like mist
from the rain-drenched earth.
She goes to Texas, orders a steak
with eggs and coffee, drives
a turquoise Cadillac heading for the gulf.
The angels of morphia want to make a home
in the dark cave of the souls mouth,
they want to crawl
inside a word, which looks more like a road
covered with snow.
Once the soul lay down
on the snow to sleep. She was naked,
weary of making.

Her mouth is pumice white
not snow, not Hiroshima ash
but white as a room hoarding all
the neighborhood light,
white as a line of limbless blouses
and bedsheets running through the bluffs
beneath a pale Nebraska sky
where a girl with scoliosis shakes
working a Hula-Hoop,
like light dancing through a painted window.

Winter nights in our neighborhood
you can hear the fire engines wail
clear through the rib cage of every cramped apartment
with at least one space heater set too high.
The village idiots have given up,
tucked in moist blankets.
Theyve bought this night on credit
beneath great archways of apathetic buildings
with names fat with purchase
like Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro.
We are recovering from Consumer Credit Counseling.
Our overspent lives read like a broadsheet of debits.

Weve been told our future lies in Default, Pennsylvania
in some trailer park with barking dogs
and corpses of old Chevies.
Could be worse. We could be like our fathers.
Or our great-grandfathers the good children bailed out
time and again from debtors prison.

The old in our building are prisoners of good manners.
Besides being foolish for not wanting to leave
when the firemen finally came.
They hemmed and hawed, fought with our super.
The weaker ones, those who could no longer fight,
wept beneath their doorways and soaked
their sticky carpets with crocodile tears
when our super ordered all of us
to abandon our homes.

That night the cold swept across our slippered feet,
the fire engines warm and still, their fat hoses
uncoiling from the giant metal spool
as my anthemless neighbors and I stood
clutching our secret possessions pressed
against our breasts as if we were all
pledging allegiance to some cruel god
who stole us away from happy sleep.

When the choppers churned and swayed
the swift brown current like a field of cogon grasses,
we dropped a rope below,

but the native girl, no older than my daughter,
was too weak to hold on, and let go.
We had to leave her to refuel, though we knew

what the river would do. When my duty was up,
I chose to come here, for humid sheets over bamboo beds,
for some honey in a slip

a ninety-pound rice cooker named Ronda
and the soap dance shes known to do. But hardly for love,
as I wait with this man bent in my arms.

When the Coca-Cola truck hit this pedicab driver,