Social History

Poems

Bobby C. Rogers

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807162057
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Poesie

Bobby C. Rogers's second collection, Social History, listens hard to the voices of American characters and celebrates the gestures of ordinary life. The long lines of his narrative poems trace the undulations of southern speech, and his careful eye for detail reflects the influence of generations of storytellers, from authors like Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty to Rogers's own distant family members, living in "decrepit houses where the floors sagged and the front rooms reeked/of snuff, bitter as the smell off a pile of clods beside an open grave, the scent of time that hadn't succeeded in passing."
In his beguiling evocations of the past, Rogers looks back with affection to the rhythms and rituals of growing up in small-town Tennessee. While his poems speak of a living connection to community and to the earth, they also acknowledge the growing need to question what we have been taught and to break free and make our own way in this world. Graceful and plainspoken, the poems of Social History bear witness to ways of living that, though past, are never truly lost.

CONTENTS

Lost Highway

Body Man

A Book by Its Cover

Abandoned Homesite in a Field

Smokers, Sunday Morning, 1975

Elizabeth Patton, Wife of Davy Crockett

The Principal’s Son

Meditation on Door Slams

The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care

Junk

Purple Martin Village

Farm Portrait

Featured Twirler

Regarding Symbols

A Hundred and One Affordable House Plans

September

I Will Not Talk in Class

Primitive Baptist

Social History

Americana

Elegy for George Garrett

All-American Cheerleader Sandi Sentell Stands in Line outside Alumni Gym before a Lecture by Gloria Steinem

Theology

Essay on Friendship

His Mark

Old Theater Ticket Found in the Pages of René Char’s Selected Poems

Interesting Case

Spit and Polish

Spring Recital, Beethoven Club, Memphis, Tenn.

Rooms with Radiators

National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) Hall of Fame Coach Jack Russell Makes a Visit to the Mound

Last Words

Salvage Yard in Mississippi

Girl Flagman on Highway 45

Fourth Grade Field Trip, Elmwood Cemetery

Rain Crow

Second Row at the Ballet

William Eggleston

Acknowledgments

Social History

Lost Highway

you’ll curse the day . . .
      —Hank Williams

Years after the fact, he would say it was the right time to make a move when he
       was invited to come into the bank, but he could see his ascent

blocked by the bank president’s son, a man his very age and already groomed to
       rise. So he clung to the safe job. Too late to take anything back

the day the news came that the banker’s son had died of a heart attack at the
       mahogany desk in his father’s office. If our fates are fitted neatly

into the pans of a scale, it might have been anything that tipped the balance, any
       wrong turn or luckless cut of the cards, something as unlikely, even,

as losing the autograph—Elvis Presley coming down the driveway of Graceland in
       1958, braking a showroom clean Duo-Glide Harley

next to the cranked down window of his just as shiny Chevy Bel-Air, twenty-four
       payment slips left in the loan book. The singer called him sir,

wrote out an autograph and handed the scrap of paper to his wife, six-months
       pregnant with their first child, the sweet ending of a spring day spent

shopping and sightseeing before the hour-long drive back to their teaching jobs in
       a crossroads town hardly big enough to have use for a school.

Or when he was a boy, keeping still under a sweat-soured quilt, trying to hide
       from the polio virus settled in one leg’s large muscles, the afternoon

of his highest fever, and through the unscreened window he could hear his parents
       reaching a decision on where to bury him. Might as well say

it all turned on the morning he was born, piercing the room with his first cried out
       description of what had befallen him, and every time

the wind nudged at the curtains, the room’s shadows gave shape to a ragged patch
       of sunlight shifting its restless edges on the floorboards.

Body Man

Billy Twiggs was an artist with a spray gun but could never paint sober. My father
       had no sympathy for a drunk—if Billy wanted the work

he’d have to pull the dent from the driver’s side door before he took his first toddy
       of the day. “I’ll give her a try,” Billy’d told him,

and I wondered if every artist looked this beleaguered of a morning. The dent was
       my doing, the first of a million mistakes

it was up to me to make right, a sixteen-year-old wild at the wheel of the family
       Ford. Billy did his prep work under a shade tree. The rotting roof

of the shed he used for a spray room sagged like a tent canvas. When the car rolled
       out again, it was only up close that you could see

each shaky pass of the paint gun, a grainy texture to the finish. Billy was all I could
       afford. God knows what he aimed to fix

self-medicating with Ten High bourbon and RC Cola, but that’s a repair that won’t
       last long. A few years later I took my own car to him

after a nearsighted neighbor put a crease down it with her Buick on a narrow
       residential street in Memphis. Billy was still the best

body man in that end of the state if you caught him at the right time of day, and the
       cheapest. What’s on the surface is all

we’ll ever lay hands on. Impossible to match the faded paint of a hard-driven
       automobile but his eye could get it close. I wasn’t about to tell a man

how to do his job. I’d held a few jobs by then and knew that to stay on the payroll
       you had to find a way to keep getting the work done. The quarter panel

he mended looked like it’d been factory dipped, so new again and so beautiful how
       could it ever blister or check? He was weaving a little

in his walk but it was his hands that did the fixing, and they were still steady when
       I paid him with teller machine twenties, counting out

more than he’d asked for, a fair enough price to slow the rust for another year, until
       the transmission went and I sold the car for scrap.

A Book by Its Cover

Forty miles to a bad bookstore from my hometown. Calendars and coffee table
books, Rod McKuen and The Collected Poems

of Robert Frost. I was barely in high school and the teachers couldn’t tell just by
looking at me which book was going to change my life, years yet

before I packed up and went away to pan the silt of a college professor’s opinions,
always a stack of titles and subtitles

under “For Further Reading” on the back page of a purple-mimeographed
syllabus. Word got around about the box of rescued books

where my mother worked, rejects saved from the shredder by someone’s husband
who ran a press at Hall Printing Company, a pile of mis-cut

romance novels with offset covers, mass market...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Lost Highway
• Body Man
• A Book by Its Cover
• Abandoned Homesite in a Field
• Smokers, Sunday Morning, 1975
• Elizabeth Patton, Wife of Davy Crockett
• The Principal’s Son
• Meditation on Door Slams
• The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
• Junk
• Purple Martin Village
• Farm Portrait
• Featured Twirler
• Regarding Symbols
• A Hundred and One Affordable House Plans
• September
• I Will Not Talk in Class
• Primitive Baptist
• Social History
• Americana
• Elegy for George Garrett
• All-American Cheerleader Sandi Sentell Stands in Line outside Alumni Gym before a Lecture by Gloria Steinem
• Theology
• Essay on Friendship
• His Mark
• Old Theater Ticket Found in the Pages of René Char’s Selected Poems
• Interesting Case
• Spit and Polish
• Spring Recital, Beethoven Club, Memphis, Tenn.
• National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) Hall of Fame Coach Jack Russell Makes a Visit to the Mound
• Last Words
• Salvage Yard in Mississippi
• Girl Flagman on Highway 45
• Fourth Grade Field Trip, Elmwood Cemetery
• Rain Crow
• Second Row at the Ballet
• William Eggleston
• Acknowledgments