Zeitgeist
All that summer, when I could still drink sloe gin fizz
but Scotch became my favorite, our misery
continued. Tom hung in his usual flux,
demonstrating freedom by trying to screw
every girl I knew. I was reading Nabokov,
flirting with the thought of moving to Peru,
going to life-drawing classes, hoping the next
hurricane would be The Big One. Tom’s
idiot brothers were doing no better:
Jack dropped out, started writing his name J-a-q,
Ken almost got picked out of a lineup—
losers! Finally Tom decided to be a gigolo.
Maybe in a year I’d move to Berlin,
not Lima, I thought, and in the interim,
outfit myself for some lofty intellectual
pursuit like linguistics. —Tom, I’d ask
querulously, I’m planning my hajj,
remember me when I’m gone, will you? I
seem not to matter to you all that much.
To be honest, I’d have thought about taking
up snake-handling to relieve the ennui, if
vanity hadn’t been a concern. Where
were our parents? Why, drunk! I’ve decided
xenophilia wasn’t so dumb. My sister’s a mystic,
you dabble in opioids, we all fear Hurricane Bob—
zeitgeist of the ’Seventies in South Carolina.
© 2018 Katherine Williams
In the abecedarian, the twenty-six lines begin in alphabetical order down the left-hand margin. In this poem, a double abecedarian, invented by Barbara Hamby, the lines go down the left as usual, but also end alphabetically in reverse order. Words that end in q or j are a problem in English, about which we can turn to Arabic for help. “Hajj” is their term for the pilgrimage to Mecca.
“Zeitgeist” appears in Kakalak 2006: An Anthology of Carolina Poets, Lisa Zerkle, Richard Allen Taylor and Beth Cagle Burt, Eds. Charlotte: Main Street Rag Publishing Co.
