“When in doubt, play track 4. It's usually the one you want.”
- Elvis Costello
I was first made aware of Bobby Rogers at a literary festival in Memphis some years ago. He read the poem below and I credit it and him with making me aware of prose-poetry and how accessible it can be. For anyone who's spent time there, I think it speaks to the day-to day rhythms and hazards of life in the Bluff City. Bobby Rogers is an English professor at Union University in Jackson, TN. He is author of three books of poetry, Paper Anniversary, Social History and Shift Work.
Philosophy
I can't say the car was broken into since I'd forgotten to lock it. When I
went out to get the paper, the day quarter-lit and unbegun, the trunk was thrown
open, the bulb lamp a weak addition to what the sunrise had a mind to get
going.
I stood there in the new light, and then I began the inventory. Jumper
cables and a field chair gone, a faucet set I'd been meaning to return to the
home center,
some hurricane relief donations we hadn't gotten around to dropping
off at Catholic Charities - bottles of shampoo, multipacks of soap and
toothbrushes, assorted store brand cleaners. The disposable diapers, baled into dense
packages, were still there. But not my Johnny Cash CDs or the digital voice
recorder left in the console with some teaching notes and the beginning of a
grocery list spoken into its memory, and a single image: unginned cotton woven in the
road weeds.
Or something like that, a few muttered words that sounded better
before they'd been stolen from me. When a thief took his lamp, Epictetus cursed himself
for owning one worth coveting. It takes a week of working at it before I can apply
philosophy to even the smallest loss, atom-thin as the coatings on a pair of
binocular's prisms, a trick to let the light in more perfectly. Here's what I'll say: It's just urban
life.
Crimes of opportunity. We live with them, like traffic and mosquitoes. I'll
say it's the cost of doing business in the old part of town - every now and then
you have to throw a lawn mower into a volcano. A philosopher's consolations, these
weary tenets of dead men's systems, knocked together so I might stop thinking how
somewhere some thieving bastard is listening to Johnny and June trade verses on Live
at Folsom Prison.
Birthdays in Music: Tom Petty (1950-2017). A moment of silence, please.
Name that Movie: “You ever seen a spleen that large?”
“No, not since breakfast.”
RP