Eamonn Wall. Photo by August Jennewein
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The Grassy Garbage of Inwood
If anyone walks through here from out of town
he/she/it will hardly be pleased by grinding
boomboxes, the leaves of twenty autumns,
every brand of beer can, bottle, and cigarette
known to the bodega owners of this great city.
And I agree that Inwood Park is an unholy mess
and would be hard pressed indeed to write the
Fall/Spring/Summer/Winter verse The New Yorker
demands for each pristine season because I don't think
that he/she/it in the dentist's waiting room
in Cincinnati would like to read a nature poem
with a beer can in it. No way. Remember too
The New Yorker pays big money for nature poems.
Nevertheless, we are here as usual in the afternoon
and when we pass the first radio you wiggle your
little ankles to the beat and when I put you on the
grass you pull it as if it were the belly hair of paradise:
you find a Winston butt and show it to me before
diving into the vast anthropology of leaves. Your
mother said to me before we left the house: "Don't
let him near the trash," but what can I do,
a child must learn what his hands are for? Finally
it's time for the stream where a bird is drinking
beside a can of Heineken Holland Beer. You walk
on the stones, crouch, and let the water flow
through your soft fingers and I shout to The New Yorker
and the gardening weeklies that this is the natural world.
I take you away from it in tears, brilliant world of
grass and radios stretching out and bursting, and a
slinking butt lying there for you to notice it.
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Eamonn Wall is a native of Co. Wexford, Ireland, who has lived in the US since 1982: in Wisconsin, New York City, Nebraska, and for the past twenty years in St. Louis. His books of poetry and prose include Junction City: New and Selected Poems 1990-2015 (Salmon Poetry, 2015); From the Sin-e Café to the Black Hills (University of Wisconsin Press. 2000); Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions (Notre Dame, 2011). Current projects include a new collection of poetry and a new book of essays on contemporary writing. He works in international education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
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