Ode To Ernie Ford

Once upon a time everything
was homemade. The tortillas
down to the chocolate eclairs
the little girls and little boys
would pick their share of as they
dangled from the arm
of the chain-smoking novena plastered
mothers in pill box hats. The bread
smelted forth out a great silent
machine, round and gray towers
with a day's worth of bread.
Traded from behind the counters
of drug stores and day-old places,
full of handwritten credits.
The salesgirl's face the same
over and over from the liquor shops
to the mercantile where all the women
felt the worth of yards of gingham
with garden tended hands stuck
in apron pockets over poodle pieces
and last year's dresses
and as they fondled bolts of laundry
hung to dry out on sagging lines
nearwhere the stockyard blood
soaked into saw dust from coin-op horses,
they sang benedictions to another day
older and deeper in debt, what you get
from eight hours in the mineral graves
the new fangled loaves to six yards of eyelet.
Before the burns and infestations,
the migrations of paisley, the formation
of smokes over the Dead Sea downwind
from Cananea pleurosis-nervosis in most of us.
The commemorations, handmade and so trusted
the dusting powders and ore cars full of snuff,
Yardley Rose of Avon, poor damn Lucky Strike.
The seas too dried to part.