So Many
so many this mornings so many movement so many breezes so many cypress so many doorways demolished so many brush so many vines crawl up the front of that house and so many spaces so many wide open between one structure and another so many ditches so many cars parked in the grass in front of a home supposedly abandoned where people live so many branches piles at the curb so many beat-downs so many row houses gone and so many porches so many cut-throughs so many feeling still in the wood so many highways invade so many train horns blow softly so many autumn morning so many springtime dusk so many pink afternoon as the sun peeks through the blinds so many pick-up trucks so many suvs so many milk factories and so many 18 wheelers so many tiny plastic bottles of milk and so many oaks and so many farms and so many concrete and so many cracked and so many peeling paint so many thickness so many depression so many joy so many angry pinpricks so many back-ups so many give me a hug so many late night drunken driving so many early morning so many mourning doves so many cooing so many police sirens so many listening so many humans walk the middle of the road so many cars wait to pass so many anger and so many smile so many apprehension so many thistles so many concrete slabs so many gape so many lost and so many nights so many grandmas so many grandkids so many people just trying to remember what used to be there so many new people who just got here so many things to misremember so many escape memory so many brains so many bodies so many bodies gone and so many cemeteries marked and unmarked so many ditches so many huevo con papa and cake so many deep deep breaths so many sighs so many pauses so many moments of silence so many marches so many meetings god so many meetings so many attempts so many failures so many new townhomes so many dispossessed so many carwashes so many cowboy hats so many persons forced out so many barbecues so many coolers so many bags of ice so many country ballads so many accordions so many quiet so many loud so many noisy so many silent so many germans so many telephone road so many lasagna so many pupusa so many gordita so many jaywalkers and so many dance moves at the bus stop so many jiggling and so many cars pass by so many stares and so many awkwardness so many good mornings so many fuck you’s so many fights and so many love- making so many graffitied so many murals so many old doors so many lintels so many country people come to the city so many bulldozers and so many work crews so many dusty lifts into air so many hardhats and so many pallets so many pine and so many sheet of metal so many buses so many stray dogs so many mean-mugging and so many evictions so many eminent domain so many minimizing and so many excuses so many money so many reasons so many justify so many sadness so many let it go and so many so-called misunder- standings so many moldy and wet so many floodlines so many hurricanes so many attitudes so many perspectives so many sung and un-sung so many panaderías demolished so many pushing and so many pulling so many mechanics so many broken down cars so many lay in the sun so many wait so many trees blow in the early morning wind so many speed up and so many people go home so many people go to work so many undone so many bulldozers so many hoses spray water on wreckage so many shovelfuls of metal and lumber so many precious objects discard so many lost in the tumble so many feelings so many yellow and red so many silver and gold so many blue and green so many green things so many grass so many suns beat down so many heatstrokes so many city moves on so many layers so many accumulations so many things a street a street remember
Copyright © 2018 by John Pluecker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 21, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
"I live in the East End in Houston, Texas, a neighborhood where my father's parents built a house in the 1920s and a space that my settler colonial family—mainly German but also Irish and other European lineages—has been transiting through for the last seven generations. Now, I move my body through this space of constant shifting, brazen capitalist profiteering, and displacement of working-class Latinx and Black folks, a few miles from the largest petrochemical complex in the United States. So many layers and so many so many so many... The poem happened one morning after a flood. Befitting my gulf coast home, the words flooded out too."
—John Pluecker