On Chehalem Drive in Newberg, Pastel, by John Cummings
The Three Houses
Duckworth, that was the farmer’s name
His house we rented, a blown out
Old unpainted farmhouse, two-story with a porch,
The wood worn from decades of wind and sun and rain
Without paint.
Up from Texas through Ohio
The entire crew got screwed a month’s pay,
Pooled money for gas and got to Idaho,
And there was a house across from Emma’s grocery,
We spent a night there, sleeping in the truck,
The truck bed ribbed and covered over with canvas.
A man in the house across from Emma’s grocery,
Told about Duckworth’s house,
And that was the first house. The second house was tiny
White painted, and while we lived there
Father had to walk the railroad tracks
Frozen half to death to pick coal in a burlap sack
To warm the house in a frigid Idaho winter
Harsh and brutal for people from South Texas. Everything was frozen
All winter, and in the spring everything was muddy and wet.
And it was a tiny, white-painted, crowded house.
The third house was 9th or 11th Avenue, the memory becomes dim,
But it was a one-story house bigger than our winter house,
It was surrounded by lilac bushes and large trees
We felt protected there and happy after the harsh winter.
A white boy befriended us, he lived at the corner,
And told me, as an adult, his mother said, “What are you
Bringing those Mexicans around for?” Also, a young man,
Sixteen years of age came running, wild-eyed frightened
Being chased by a car with toughs hanging onto the running boards
And found refuge, he did, in our rented house.
______________
Zeke Sanchez
Review by Dave Mehler
What I appreciate about these poems of Zeke Sanchez is that they represent real life and real struggles and memories of those struggles. There is no self-pity and no expectations of anything from his readers–he is writing for himself, not us, and that proves a strength in these poems, I think–the casual, unpretentious address, not out to impress anybody, but to do the simple work on the author’s behalf of remembering and processing through these memories. A catalog of houses. Notice how he never uses the word home. Thinking about family and upbringing, and what a blessing (mixed) it was to have houses rather than trucks or rail cars to live out of–even remembers the name of the farmer who rented his family their first crappy house (noting twice it was unpainted), his father having to forage spilled coal from nearby passing rail cars. This is the stuff of life–a traveling migrant family’s lives, facing poverty and prejudice, incidentally, again, related without pretention, suppressed rage or manipulative ulterior motive. These poems don’t suffer an agenda, because they don’t care about us or what we think–they’re for Zeke. Each house is a little better than the last, then to finally land in a third house with fragrant flowering lilacs outside, and one that could even prove to become a refuge to outsiders! These poems provide a refuge at the very least to this reader! It’s a rough world out there.