By: Oliver de la Paz

From: Please Excuse This Poem

This poem demonstrates rhetoric because--as someone who grew up in a very small town--there are many drawbacks, as one might have guessed. However, there is a feeling among those who live there, who did once, that it calls you back home; it holds a special place in your memory. And, maybe, it is the one thing that can justify why they are not really so bad after all. The poem reads:

When I look at it, it's simple, really. I hated life there.

Septemeber.

once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay.

And the smells

of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes

or the farmhands' breeches smeared with oil and diesel

as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station

split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action

happened on Friday nights where the high school

football team

gave everyone a chance at forgiveness.

The town left no room

for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone's son and

despite that,

we'd cruise up and down the avenues, switching between

brake and gearshift. We'd fight and spit chew

into Big Gulp cups

and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned

to fire a shotgun at nine and wrong a chicken's neck

with one by twirling the bird and whipping

it straight like a towel.

But I loved the place once. Everything was blond

and cracked

and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth.

You could

ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf

or catch on the streets each word

of a neighbor's argument.

Nothing could happen there and if I willed it,

the place would have me

slipping over its rocks into the river

with the sugar plant's steam

or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up

with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits.

IfI've learned anything, it's that I could go anywhere,

staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap

of billiard balls

against each other in the bar, and hear my name.

Indifference now?

Some. I shook loose, but that isn't the whole story.

The fact is

I'm still in love. And when I wake up,

I watch my son yawn

and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks

at the edge of the field. Stillness is an acre, and his body

idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him

back there,

to the small town of my youth, and hold the book

of wildflowers

open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors

of horses.

to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds

fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though

the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts

stay there,

riding slightly and just out of reach.