`At the Heart of the Heart of America'

Trace the places I’ve lived (states only – cities, towns and neighborhoods defy fractal geometry) and the line described is a flattened “V” with an aborted curlicue at the beginning – Ohio to Indiana, to New York, to Texas, to Washington. That’s “V” as in vagile, vitriolic, vivisepulture and volable, reflections of the variegated nation. We seem defined by geography. It’s part of our big, shifting, contradictory identity. In the title poem from his new collection, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, August Kleinzahler (a New Jersey-born longtime resident of San Francisco) writes:

“I have come here from far away
After many years of wandering
Disillusion
And found surcease here from all my cares
Surcease here from doubt
Here, at the center of it all
On a great slab of Mesozoic rock
This sanctified ground
Here, yes, here
The dead solid center of the universe
At the heart of the heart of America”

In July 1966, around the time Bob Dylan wrecked his motorcycle, during Dr. Sam Sheppard’s second trial, my brother and I passed through Rapid City, S.D., on a family vacation and remember nothing. To the east is Wall, S.D., home of Wall Drug Store, which we remember vividly (jackalopes, rattlesnakes frozen in polystyrene, “Free water!”); to the west, Mount Rushmore, which gets confused with North by Northwest. But Rapid City is a blank, and maybe that’s Kleinzahler’s point. In spite of the poem’s fragmentary state and drifting, unfocused sense of irony – references to Kevin Costner, for God’s sake – there’s an elegiac quality to it, a sadness it shares with William H. Gass’ “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”:

“So I have sailed the seas and come . . .
to B . . .
a small town fastened to a field in Indiana. Twice there have been twelve hundred people here to answer to the census. The town is outstandingly neat and shady, and always puts its best side to the highway. On one lawn there’s even a wood or plastic iron deer.”

Kleinzahler’s poems are always on the move, starting in media res and staying there, and his theme is movement, travel, “the Territory ahead.” In “Traveler’s Tales: Chapter 34” he writes:

“walking the streets
always in search of the red lantern
betokening the entrance to an unforeseen world.”

And in “Waking in a Room and Not Knowing Where One Is”:

“I cannot yet recall what city this is I’m in.
It must be close to dawn.”

Kleinzahler’s poems, like the country, don’t always cohere, and they’re probably not meant to. At the level of fragments, images compressed in isolation, he captures what Tom Waits called “the dark warm narcotic American night.” My brother, who has lived within a 20-mile radius all his life, wrote to me in an e-mail on Tuesday:

“Robing your compulsions as destinies is pure poetry.”