In McCarthy’s The Road,
the Smokies have all faded
from lush green to ashen gray.
The leather faces of the father and son
emerge onto the apocalyptic panorama,
waking in a nightmare life.
They rummage through the landscape,
with no feast in sight; everyone is hungry,
the violence of the world made manifest.
This is what I thought it would look like.
But here in Memphis, each lawn is so rife
with wildflowers that my morning walk
does nothing to clear my head.
Every scene is so urban pastoral: squirrels
in a ruckus, pro-lifers picketing Choices,
cyclists in Spandex, chatty bystanders.
Overton Park looks like a Seurat painting,
the one where a field of bourgeois bask in
the not-too-hot spring day, a sea of parasols
dotting the landscape. Here, the fathers and sons
have sunbeams illuminating their faces, and words
like “hungry” and “thirsty” are as benign as
“What do you want to do today?”
Dogs wag their felicitous tails
in the drooling ease of Spring.
In the background, Gene Wilder croons,
if you want to view paradise, simply
look around and view it.
For a moment, Memphis in bloom
is more compelling than the memento mori
of death, rising.
Each day, my brother texts me the numbers,
and the statistical grimness makes me think
America has found a new sporting event—
The losses pile up, and we never win.
Once home, I kick off my shoes,
open the windows, and try to parse
what McCarthy got wrong. That a plague
doesn’t happen in a Seurat painting.
What horrific beauty is this.
Rideshare. Cam Napier. Photography series. 2020.