Listen to this poem using the player above.
Red Truck Elegy
Dozer, the beefy black lab, wants into the car
he sniffs the air, scenting my son’s watermelon lollipop
just a few feet away sits our red truck, silent, flashers on
a gift from my dad, it’s different from the red truck
my wife and her baseball team would cram into the bed of
back in Oregon, after the game, going to get ice cream
this red truck is smaller, though it’s hauled its share of wood
the bottom is rusted, looking like something you should
discover with a submarine while searching the ocean floor
I performed my only successful automotive surgery on this truck
using the last wire coat hanger in the world to wire up
the muffler and tailpipe, which were grinding against the axle
my dad couldn’t have done much better, because he
doesn’t know anything about cars or trucks either, despite
being much better versed in practical things than I am
and more comfortable with getting his hands dirty
John flits around the garage, moving from mechanic to Dozer
to the two lazy German shepherds who lie at the feet
of an elderly couple on the garage’s only two chairs
eating submarine sandwiches and adding to the local flavor
if the truck is dead, we’ve decided not to resuscitate it
we’ll just cut the cord that anchors it to us and let it sink into memory
captured in the occasional photograph, just like its bigger brother
with my father-in-law’s head poking into the flower-packed bed
I’ve heard enough stories about that truck that it looms in my created past
almost as large as he does, gone just after I met him, gone too soon
this truck, though, was here just long enough to carry us to the top of the hill
and now we’ll walk down the other side on our own
Sure, reading poetry to a room full of people is fun, and I’ll do it whenever the opportunity presents itself. But on Thursday, May 6, I had a chance to experience poetry in a totally different way – by talking about it in two classes at Monroe Community College (MCC) in Rochester.
I traveled to the Rochester, NY, area this week for a series of poetry events. On Wednesday, May 5, I made my first stop in Avon, NY, about 30 minutes from Rochester. I joined Alan Casline, John Roche, Paulette Swartzfager, Stephen Lewandowski, Dwain Wilder and Ken Warren for an afternoon of poetry beside the cannons in the park. The park is in the middle of a traffic circle in downtown Avon, so our reading was accompanied by the slow circling of cars and trucks and the occasional, slightly confused pedestrian.
Alan Casline [pictured at left] brought ambrosia with mead to share with the group. It was a gorgeous afternoon, so we sprawled out on the grass to listen and to soak up the sun. Alan read several poems, including one about a hike he and Steve Lewandowski went on that included a line about Steve sliding down a snow-covered bank “like a third grader on a lunch tray.”
John Roche [pictured at left] paid homage to the location of the reading will several poems about Avon, the town where he makes his home. One of his pieces was a protest poem about the closing of a local watering hole. I enjoyed John’s intensely specific words of protest — it’s important to be reminded that protest poems can be very, very local.
Stephen Lewandowski, [pictured at left] a longtime chronicler of — and advocate for — the Finger Lakes region, ended his set of poems with one that took me completely by surprise. It was a poem about the increase of the signal strength of Jazz90.1 (WGMC) and Steve’s resulting ability to hear Oscar Peterson and other jazz greats at his Finger Lakes home. What made this poem so surprising for me is that boosting the station’s power was a project I oversaw as station manager of Jazz90.1 from 2002-2004. What was even more surprising was that it was a complete coincidence that Steve read the piece — he didn’t realize my connection to the station. I was very moved to hear someone who so appreciated the results of all those thousands of hours of fundraising and advocacy.
Unfortunately, I had to leave right before Dwain Wilder [pictured at left] and — I assume — Paulette Swartzfager read (sorry!), so that I could make it to my own reading that night at St. John Fisher. But I thoroughly enjoyed spending an afternoon in the company of such insightful people. I hope the “poetry at the cannons” reading will be just the first in a long series of such events in Avon.
Born and raised in Canandaigua, NY, Matt Smythe is a Creative Supervisor/Producer at Jay Advertising in Rochester. After serving 8 years in the U.S. Army he returned home to complete his A.S. in Biology at Finger Lakes Community College and his B.A. in English from SUNY Brockport. He received his M.A. in Literature from George Mason University, in Fairfax, VA. An avid outdoorsman, Matt writes poetry and non-fiction for his blog, 
