Leonard Kress: “Slovenian Button-Box Accordion Polka”
SLOVENIAN BUTTON-BOX ACCORDION POLKA
I came this close to betraying my wife and family
though they abandoned me first, leaving town
for the glorious east, so now I have to swerve
between big rigs and chug steep grades
and ride the brakes for hours
along the Pennsylvania Turnpike to reach them.
Back and forth dozens of times,
alone with only my crackly radio for company.
Then it happened, two hours from Pittsburgh,
the usual Sunday sermons and shock talk
replaced by a Slovenian button-box accordion polka
and the urge overwhelming and irresistible
to exit the next tollbooth and venture up into the hills
to join the wild yipping dancers—wondering
but not caring if it was just an old recording
never to be reissued, wondering but not caring
if the bar with tables shoved back to the wall
to accommodate the throng of dancers
had been boarded for decades
and the steel mill where the men worked
was defunct as the one I worked at
the summer after high school, chipping weld
from I-beam joints, bounding through crated stacks
in the forklift while the others broke
for lunch, this mill now fully rusted
and crushed back into the red earth.
I was willing to take the risk,
willing to forego the love of those I love
and their new lives on the east coast
as the one and two and one and two
of the rhythm drove itself deep into the tissue
of my flesh, if only my radio hadn’t dropped
the signal as I entered the Tuscarora Tunnel
unable to penetrate the mountain.
After Gerald Stern
Leonard Kress has published poetry, translations, non-fiction, and fiction in Missouri Review, Tupelo, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. Among his collections are The Orpheus Complex, Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021. He has received multiple grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Kress teaches at Temple University.