We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
—The Big Book
I. For Rich or for Poor
Four thousand acres, every parcel squared—
a river oxbowed through it, and its beds
drained it of torrents every summer sheds,
and there never a prairie rose was spared.
The day we met Ed glared up at my chin
and scoffed at my pretensions. “Boy, your bank
holds you in hock. Where do you think you rank?
You’re just a worm of Eve conceived in sin.”
Spindly I thought it, wheat sick in the dust.
“Wheat? This is bluegrass in its second year,
and every bushel here is free and clear
and six Kentucky dollars I can trust.”
I watched a hand herd cattle. “Is that Dan?”
“Pay no mind to my son. He’s just a drunk,”
but decades later, when their farm is sunk,
I search out Dan, survivor of his clan,
to ask for help. All Ed’s vast fortune gone
is nothing to the little girl Dan lost.
And thirty million dollars? Trifling cost,
notes swept by a whirlwind from a lawn.
Will he befriend an Irishman who seeks
to marry abstinence and piety?
We are both bankrupt, but sobriety—
Dan measures it in decades, I in weeks.
II. My Mentor
Wallwork could be the soberest man on earth
except that he was wasted half the time,
able to give a million, shave a dime.
Money was central to his sense of worth.
Should not have been the case. Harvard degree,
intellect incandescent in the extreme,
a trophy wife, a life lived in a dream
turned nightmare for its want of sanctity.
Wallwork was an enabler for me,
forcefully putting forth his monied power
to finance mortgaged farms where I could glower,
blind to my growing inebriety.
I have loved men divorced from heaven’s grace
for whom, fraying my jeans, I nightly pray
and earn indulgences on All Souls’ Day.
Of Wallwork and some poet friends I say
“Embrace them Lord, let them behold Your face.”
III. In Absentia
Waking at seven? I should be at my meeting,
sober as any lawyer, any plumber.
Tonight I had signed up to do the greeting,
to search the hopeless eyes of each newcomer
and say to him, “Nobody here is flawless.
We have twelve laws, and all of us were lawless.”
