Rue
a business traveler, territorial
in the grassy gaps.
I sold bonds
to clients hungry for bonds
in the boundless sales call
door to door among
“folks.”
It was a job
I was born with.
I had a heavy sample bag
rubber-banded stack of calling cards
and leather binder
(embossed)
opening upon a vista of
lamination, obligation
rumination.I furnished
a nation to the chemical engineers and wives
of Schenectady, New York,
over coffee, over roast beef
and piano, a kingdom, a nation, a
principality, landlocked state, aspirational acreage,
spiritual fallout hideout.
I showed a picture of my boy
cross-legged in front of a backdrop
of a glaciated hanging valley
deep in the transaction
among handshakes and signatures
if it came to it
This is my boy, I said
Come to me.I was a traveler.
Later I inspected
the nickel mines near Sudbury
telling my boy about the endless
sheer black subterranean drop
in the cage.
I was telling the truth
when I knew how to, as I had to, as
sales required, as stewardship permitted, long before
disembodiment.
I kept a picture of my boy
in front of a cardboard tree and treehouse platform
tacked to the upholstered
partition above my desk.
Once I brought him to the office.
He stared at himself.
“I had a treehouse then,” he said.
“Rue” originally appeared in The Iowa Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
Mark Levine is the author of three books of poems, Debt, Enola Gay, and The Wilds, and a book of nonfiction, F5. A new book of poems, Travels of Marco, will be published by Four Way Books in Spring 2016. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, an NEA, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, his poems have appeared in numerous journals and in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Hybrid and American Poets in the the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics. A member of the Workshop faculty since 1999, he has also worked extensively as a journalist for magazines including The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and The New Yorker.
