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Roy Bentley
Christmas List
My mother bought everything. In the stores, heads would swivel at her pleasure, a gift to the onlookers. Christmas Eve, although an agnostic on her best day, she abracadabraed a grandly private stash of believing and trusting the better story of It’s a Wonderful Life. An avalanche messaging George Lassos the Moon. My father (her accomplice) assembled a red bicycle or a machine-gun on a tripod, hearing in wind outside Christmases in poverty and scarcity in eastern Kentucky. For him, it was all about the approximate manner of things somewhere between the baubles and beads of consumerism and real joy. A factory job was a house with tile flooring. For her, giving was a prayer to an angel named Clarence. She checked off each item like the answer to that prayer. Toys, in nineteen-fifties cellophane, new and unwrapped, straight from the retail shelves to a car’s trunk to call out to a lucky, sound-asleep child as if to an entire country-- Fort Apache. Gunsmoke. Rock-‘Em-Sock-‘Em-Robots. 1946
Ed has come home to Neon from Ashland Pen to the north, having served a year and two months for the wounding of a US Army major in India. He’s pissed, sure, but who isn’t in these hills? A bad discharge doesn’t mean disgrace, either. Most of the male population of Letcher County has been in some sort of scrape with the Law. Hillfolk are dangerous when shoved or shot at. Ed Potter wants not to be told he looks a lot like John Garfield since what he hears is Pretty Boy. One more idle hour and he may explode yet again. Neon looks different as he walks from the Junction-- the way the interior walls of a B-17 Flying Fortress will look different in different light, then familiar as you stand in the door about to jump, then jump shouting the Americanized name of that Apache who bested the Army long enough to get famous. When was the Bentley place bricked bright red? Just when did D.V. Bentley get so prosperous? Ed is ready to profit from his stretch in the pen, prepared to holler Geronimo! and jump into life after war and ransacking an overseas world for the purpose of getting even. Ol’ Doc Bentley may need him to cut brush from bottomland or swing a pick or polish a convertible. Now, as he passes the house, he sees lights burning with a radiance that says they’re not gas lamps. When did Neon get electric like Ashland Pen? He needs someone to answer a few questions. The Commonwealth of the State of Kentucky owes him a clarification. And a decent meal like one he had sat down to when that major staggered into him. Spilling whiskey. Acting, back on his feet, as if nothing had happened. The First Face of God
Fewer than 100 Florida panthers are alive in the wild today, hanging on in the southern tip of Florida. The big cats were hunted to near extinction by the mid-1950s. --Scientific American, October 30, 2009 Approaching dark and the end of a summer day in Florida are what they are, and may be like the face of the Almighty— a light of first and last things, if you believe that sort of stuff. Once, in Stuart, Florida, a neighbor of mine, Chance Locke, sauntered out to collect blue and yellow bins for recyclables. (It was pick-up day.) This was a few months before he died, and he wasn’t feeling at all himself as he looked to oneside, into his flower beds, to glimpse a Florida panther asleep as if almost nothing in this busy world or the next could disturb it. He was startled. As one might be, blissfully afoot in lastlight and coming upon such a thing. But he thought, No one will believe this happened and hurried next door to tell someone. A man he woke brought a camera. Snapped a picture. And after Chance was gone to ash and scattered in the poor lake behind our houses, I had a memento to remind me to watch. And remember how seeing like that doesn’t end in whispers about squadrons of angels. Most days, the palms siphon off much of the light until what we see is a coming on of dark. You tell yourself not to love the light more than the dark, then the air fills with what you love in spite of yourself. for Carolyn Highland |
Roy Bentley’s work has been recognized with fellowships from the NEA, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Ohio Arts Council. His poem, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” won the American Literary Review Poetry Contest in 2008, judged by Tony Hoagland. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Pleiades, Blackbird, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review and elsewhere. Books include Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama, 1986), Any One Man (Bottom Dog Books, 1992), The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine Press, 2006), and Starlight Taxi (Lynx House Press, 2013). |
