Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CODAS, by JEFF DANIEL MARION


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

CODAS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: What you see is what you get'
Subject(s): Reality


"What you see is what you get."
Such codas we learned from exotic
sources, say the carnival barker lining
his olive-skinned girls onstage outside the tent,
their little hoochie-coochie twists
and bumps luring us in to the hope
of some imagined Casbah. "Just a hint,
boys, of what you'll see inside." Room led to room
like every mystery, until our pockets emptied
of loose change, and we still had not seen it all.
So it was with my father's junk house,
so much to see and so little
time to take it all in: rows of jars
loaded with rubber washers, gaskets,
nuts and bolts, brass wood screws,
steel ball bearings so shiny I could feel
the silky roundness of them turning
between my fingers, a few slipped to school
for trade as we scrawled with shoetip
the ovals and rings in the dust of marble
season. How did he know what had been moved
and placed back so carefully, a PT-boat
piston cut in half and fashioned
into an ashtray (his relic from the war
years of working for Alcoa in Detroit), only two
ball bearings taken from the jar and clacking
in my pocket? At ten I believed it was
the immaculate order in the mind of God,
his eye on each and every sparrow. "Son,
you don't need to be messing with the things
in my house." And so I learned not to tamper,
to look but not to touch. Until I turned fourteen
and he handed me his .22 automatic rifle:
at the dumpsite I watched him
drop rats on the run, never more than
a single shot. He lined five beer bottles
against the red clay bank. "First you shoot
the lip off, then the neck, and last you take
the easy gut shot." Long ago I had heard
the legend around town: "Boy, your old man
could shoot the hairs off a chigger's ass."
Our first trip into the field,
"See that rabbit hiding over behind the cedar --
take him when I flush him out." I stared
and stared and finally saw the tip of one ear
peeking through the cedar. Gut-shot, he flopped
down the bank. My father turned his back
to me, lifted the rabbit by its hind legs,
and stilled its spasms with one quick blow
to the head. He thought I did not see,
and through all the years we never spoke
of it. But today, standing in his junk house
ten years past his dying, I lift from memory
that old tattered scrap "What you see
is what you get," look at all these treasures
he laid up, and bow to every moment of his mercy.







Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net