American Pie / Texas Fruit

American Pie / Texas Fruit

A long, long time ago,
the Father, Son and Holy Ghost got jumped
by three men outside Dallas

who made them for queers.
The lynching ended quickly;
the judgment did not.

Those present on the night say you could hear
Satan's narrow laugh
echo down Main Street and curl its fingers around the bluebells' throats.

Everyone got nervous after that.
Doors were locked, canned peaches opened.
Too much skelter, not enough helter, they said.

Of course such rationalizations do not stand up
to even meager scrutiny. It is not February
that makes men shiver, but the thought that something could reach deep inside them

and touch.
As for the levee, the whiskey or rye,
the sweet perfume of bodies crashing into one another

behind the gym, the quarterback
chewing his pink carnation down to the pith as another gorgeous tight end
runs a midnight route to his doorstep—

None of it was enough. The birds flew off
without taking so much as a backwards look.
Broken or not, deflowered or not, the bluebells thundered and chimed

all through the streets of Dallas for forty days and nights.
Pickup trucks stalled. Fields lay fallow. Old Boys
crawled on their knees through the foul grass

begging for one last chance to be Good,
but the angel
never came.

Instead they got a jester in a Chevy
who rolled up to the courthouse steps and set up
a fruit stand. He didn't look anything like James Dean, but he laughed
like him, and he was good with a knife, and there was watermelon.
So mostly, folks didn't complain.

It had been a hot summer. The watermelon was cold and sweet, and they ate until the red juice ran
like ripe blood through the streets. At sunset, a boy
wearing a crown of blue flowers in his corn-yellow hair
approached the jester, stood on tiptoe, and whispered
in his ear.

No one knows exactly what was said, but there are rumors: the boy declared the three men he admired the most
were all women. He asked if he could have an orange and did the jester write the Book of Love.

Here is where accounts differ. Some say the jester tried to steal his thorny crown—a glint in the eye, a swipe of
the hand—a bad gypsy come to snatch the last bloom of innocence away from a pure son of Texas.

Others say the jester was kind to the boy. He smoothed his hair with a tortoiseshell comb, made him a rose
from a strawberry. The boy had not asked for an orange, but rather, “Aren't you the angel? Will you help my dad get to heaven?"

To which the tamarind-skinned vendor replied, "Mijo, only God and Ritchie Valens can save the mortal soul.But if you want, I sure can teach you how to dance real slow."

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