The Clay County Fair is Calling Me Home
Rodney Torreson


 
for Johnny Rivers, near 70, to take a ride on the rockabilly
decades after his heyday, still holding his own
in the uplifted eye of the town of Spencer,
where a Ferris Wheel prevails for a week each September.
Let the grandstand slow his blue-eyed soul
born of a sky hanging blue among the trees
in sunny Iowa, where folks will toss up an idea,
then feel the wind warmly wheeling it about.
 
Forty-four years ago, my steps wove through Midway,
music everywhere, not only in the grandstand
but the screened-in pie stand, where sweet meringue swirled up
and sang, the cream pie I’d eat always rising to # 1,
like “Poor Side of Town,” all over that autumn
with Johnny pining, "To him you were nothing
but a little plaything / not much more than an overnight fling,”
which I misheard as “overnight flame,” light left untamed,
 
with Midway’s many lights melting into midnight--
no matter the hour, and me in the shadows
of his Changes LP, imagining I’m handsome like Johnny
on the cover, winning back my girl in the dark
in a year the fair could have never lured Johnny
out riding moonbeams after a run on the Sunset Strip,
lighting up the Whiskey A Go Go with “Maybelline”
 and “A Mountain of Love,” which I learned
this spring before they lay Harmon Killebrew,
                                   
Twins’ slugger, in the ground, was the Killer’s favorite song,          
leaving me to long even more for the calm waters
of Johnny’s tenor soothing ears recoiling from the tune
of the tractor pull, the rising octaves of the raceway screaming
that I haven’t been to the fair since I was lifted up
that final year, when a waitress with a broom
asked me to raise my legs so that she could sweep,
and being too slow I was swept up, up,
and out of there, over the Spook House and Ferris Wheel.
 









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About the Author:  Rodney Torreson was the poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan from 2007-2010.  He is the author of four books, the latest being The Secrets of Fieldwork, a chapbook of poems published by Finishing Line Press in 2010. His two full-length books are A Breathable Light (New Issues Press) and The Ripening of Pinstripes: Called Shots on the New York Yankees (Story Line Press). In addition, he has had many poems appear in anthologies and journals, most recently for publication in Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry and Third Coast.

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