Pouncey’s is a Mom & Pop in Perry, a fairly remote town
in northwest Florida. We chose it
because the parking lot was full, and 80% of the vehicles were pickups. I tried
fried ribs, which I’d never heard of. They were pretty tough, and ribs have
enough flavor prepared the traditional ways. I’ll stick to chicken hereafter.
The cabbage casserole and black-eyed peas were only OK, but the ambience was a
solid A—all locals, it seemed, greeting each other and saying a fair amount of
not much, as we all do when we’re locals.
I wondered about the 100% Caucasian clientele when 40% of
Perry’s population is black and 2% Hispanic. Are southern Mom & Pops, like our
churches, America’s most segregated places? Maybe it has nothing to do with the
South.
From the next table, an elderly-but-not-ancient couple struck
up a conversation. They’ve retired from Perry to 160 acres with three fish
ponds in 35 miles north. He speaks with pride of his children’s outcomes (his
son runs a business in Perry).
The Mrs. is trim, with short, slightly wavy, senior citizen
hair, and a classic church lady manner. Her smile seems genuine, but I’d swear
there was a hint of ferocity below her surface.
Only when they’re about to leave does it become clear that
he’s on a walker. She takes it from the wall where it was leaning and pulls it
over to their table. Then she positions herself behind him, grabs his pants and
belt in the middle of his lower back, and with one hand, hoists him into the
walker, as a mother might do with a misbehaving four-year-old.
I’m not
sure you'll see a tight connection between that little sketch and Stephen
Dobyns’ poem, “Tenderly,” but here goes.
I’d also
like to know how much you like and respect the poem. At first I gave it less
than a grade of A because it seemed to be so completely a
story in prose—broken arbitrarily into lines of wannabe poetry.
However,
the thing has stuck with me for a few days now, and I’m beginning to
reevaluate. Like many of the best poems of the “School of Accessibility,”
there’s a powerful whole here that might overcome rather ordinary
language. I will not soon forget the
central image of the man on the table, plus some of the details about the other
diners and Dobyns’ implied theme(s).
What is it that does or does not draw us together? What are the best
images of despair? Is it ever acceptable for us to know only the final result,
the despair, without knowing the events that led up to it? Sometimes the
answers are bizarre. Maybe.
I also
wonder about the way we respond to explicit sexuality in poetry—it’s not all
that common, after all. Is Dobyns playing unfairly by appealing to our baser
interests—not just sexuality, but a weird take on it? Or are the rest of us too
reluctant to accept sexuality as an important human experience and therefore very
much the property of poetry?
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