The Place Rumored to be Sodom was a Corn Field

The year is 1943. Waiting for someone to come home is as common, to quote Jack Spicer, "as rats and seaweed." The only things that know close holding are sweet, yearbook dreams put on hold by the war.

Of course, the real bedrock and undercurrent of those dreams was more drear and dry. But there is a kind of collective forbearance, bred and left by the Great Depression, that is almost rhapsodic in its pervasiveness throughout America. Ed Dorn, then (c. 1963) in his 30s, remembers a rural America far less lyrical than Wendell Berry's in this extraordinary poem, "On The Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck." It is hard for anyone born into land-of-largess America to remember a time when the Sears Roebuck catalog mailed to millions was as close to Amazon as the world got before WWII. It came once a year and it was a major event that cast a lifeline to America's mighty Mississippi of manufacture, especially to farm folk. I can only, or barely, imagine the sensuality of leafing through that giant tome of commerce and feeling the thrill of necessity and pangs of occasional frivolity as people with plenty of nothing planned to fill their households with products shown on those pages.

Credit was out of its infancy by then, made more right and reasonable by the closed loop of thriving American industrial capitalism. After all, how bad could it be to long for the output of one's neighbors and countrymen? No commandment could be broken by such desire or the goods that were its object. The debt, or karma, of a system based on consumption of one's own labor was more purely spiritual--a matter for Sabbath concern: not the right to want what one could pay for but its rightful, proportionate place. Ah, the glorious self-fulfilling prophecy of pre-global America where everyone baked the wafers they were fed in their churches. Imports to those in Kansas were from a not-so-distant Cathay called Detroit. So when the war Dorn invokes at the end of this poem enters, desire deferred has an autonomic presumption of fulfillment. One of the first and tastiest spoils of war will be resumption of domestic production and consumption.

For readers of this magnificent poem today, Dorn, writing in the early 1960s, is an almost enviable throwback to a classic, now-vanished commonplace of Marxist-style worker alienation. His concerns seem almost luxurious in their pure American self-containment. The debt, like all the things it buys, is still made in the USA. The alienation has nothing yet to do with massive deprivation of a role in production (forget ownership of its means). That sadness is yet to come. Jobs still come back in 1945 and continue to do so until globalization takes ferocious, irreversible grip in the 1970s. Workers of the world unite! will no longer be an option for Americans by 1980. Being will be replaced by the pseudo-occupation of isolated consumption and a nothingness of brands. Consumption will have no relationship to labor. And, fittingly, the debt will be owed to banks not stores. The final stage of alienation is complete loss of its detection or even a need for vigilance against it. But Dorn is as much Wobbly as wobbler.

So by remembering when a locust plague took a measure of desolation that was so profound and confounding that its symbolism was tearful, Dorn reminds me of awakenings through poetry that seem to have no counterpart. It hurts to imagine the feudal farm existence that led Dorn to write this about his mother: "...the dust of the fields / in her eyes, the only title she ever had to lands..." And oh that opening with its dry, remorseless heat. I have never seen the dustbowl life of the 1930s summarized better than the brittleness of an existence likened to crackling of a locust body under foot. Dorn says the sound is "like the breaking of / a mechanical bare heart which collapses / from an unkind an incessant word whispered..." This is one of the most unrelentingly powerful poems I have ever read. I have carried it with me since college and I have thought about it as much as any Christian thinks of a talismanic psalm. How, I wonder, do our hearts re-leaven with exuberant purpose? Is not praise simply devout compassionate affection?

More than anything else these days, I fear achieving nothing more than a truce with my melancholy. I fear I will die less than the man I owe this poem the duty to become: Bodhisattva on the loose and sometimes on the run. My mantra: "Scared sacred," as someone (maybe me) wrote years and years ago. Only now its not jolting into a higher state. It's just a way of notating the close ground proximity and co-terminousness of both states. My prayer: that it not be a photo finish between the two states, but a clear runaway triumph of the One, a higher debt paid in full.


ON THE DEBT MY MOTHER OWED TO SEARS ROEBUCK

Summer was dry, dry the garden
our beating hearts, on that farm, dry
with the rows of corn the grasshoppers
came happily to strip, in hordes, the first
thing I knew about locust was they came
dry under the foot like the breaking of
a mechanical bare heart which collapses
from an unkind an incessant word whispered
in the house of the major farmer
and the catalogue company,
from no fault of anyone
my father coming home tired
and grinning down the road, turning in
is the tank full? thinking of the horse
and my lazy arms thinking of the water
so far below the well platform.

On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck
we brooded, she in the house, a little heavy
from too much corn meal, she
a little melancholy from the dust of the fields
in her eye, the only title she ever had to lands--
and man's ways winged their way through the mail
saying so much per month
so many months, this is yours, take it
take it, take it, take it
and in the corncrib, like her lives in that house

the mouse nibbled away at the cob's yellow grain
until six o'clock when her sorrow grew less
and my father came home

On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck?
I have nothing to say, it gave me clothes to
wear to school,
and my mother brooded

in the rooms of the house, the kitchen, waiting
for the men she knew, her husband, her son
from work, from school, from the air of locusts
and dust making the hedges of field she knew
in her eye as a vague land where she lived,
boundaries, whose tractors chugged pulling harrows
pulling discs, pulling great yields from the earth
pulse for the armies in two hemispheres, 1943
and she was part of that stay at home army to keep
things going, owing that debt.

--Ed Dorn, Way More West; New and Selected Poems, Penguin Books, 2007, pages 25-6