Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
From The Unborn (1985)
From Transparent Gestures (1989)
From Apocalyptic Narrative and Other Poems (1993)
From Things That Happen Once (1996)
From Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1999)
From Kingdom of the Instant (2002)
New Poems (2005)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First Mariner Books edition 2007
Copyright © 2006 by Rodney Jones
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections
from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Rodney, 1950–
Salvation blues : one hundred poems, 1985–2005 / Rodney Jones.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-62430-0
ISBN-10: 0-618-62430-9
I. Title.
PS3560.O5263S25 2006
811'.54—dc22 2005010550
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-87226-8 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-618-87226-4 (pbk.)
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Lisa Diercks
Typeset in Clifford Eighteen
MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Gloria
From The Unborn (1985)
REMEMBERING FIRE
Almost as though the eggs run and leap back into their shells
And the shells seal behind them, and the willows call back their
driftwood,
And the oceans move predictably into deltas, into the hidden
oubliettes in the sides of mountains,
And all the emptied bottles are filled, and, flake by flake, the snow
rises out of the coal piles,
And the mothers cry out terribly as the children enter their bodies,
And the freeway to Birmingham is peeled off the scar tissue of fields,
The way it occurs to me, the last thing first, never as in life,
The unexpected rush, but this time I stand on the cold hill and watch
Fire ripen from the seedbed of ashes, from the maze of tortured glass,
Molten nails and hinges, the flames lift each plank into place
And the walls resume their high standing, the many walls, and
the rafters
Float upward, the ceiling and roof, smoke ribbons into the wet cushions,
And my father hurries back through the front door with the box
Of important papers, carrying as much as he can save,
All of his deeds and policies, the clock, the few pieces of silver;
He places me in the shape of my own body in the feather mattress
And I go down into the soft wings, the mute and impalpable country
Of sleep, holding all of this back, drifting toward the unborn.
SWEEP
The two Garnett brothers who run the Shell station here,
who are working separately just now,
one hunched under the rear axle of Skippy Smith's Peterbilt tractor,
the other humming as he loosens the clamps
to replace my ruptured heater hoses,
have aged twenty years since I saw them last
and want only to talk of high school
and who has died from each class.
Seamless gray sky, horns from the four-lane,
the lot's oil slicks rainbowing and dimpling with rain.
I have been home for three days, listening to an obituary.
The names of relatives met once,
of men from the plant where he works,
click like distant locks on my father's lips.
I know that it is death that obsesses him
more than football or weather
and that cancer is far too prevalent
in this green valley of herbicides and chemical factories.
Now Mike, the younger brother,
lifts from my engine compartment
a cluster of ruined hoses,
twisted and curled together like a nest of blacksnakes,
and whistles as he forages in the rack
for more. Slowly, the way things work down here,
while I wait and the rain plinks on the rims of overturned tires,
he and my father trade the names of the dead:
Bill Farrell for Albert Dotson,
Myles Hammond, the quick tackle of our football team,
for Don Appleton, the slow, redheaded one.
By the time the rack is exhausted,
I'm thinking if I lived here all year I'd buy American,
I'd drive a truck, and I'm thinking
of football and my father's and Mike's words
staking out an absence I know I won't reclaim.
Because I don't get home much anymore,
I notice the smallest scintilla of change,
every burnt-out trailer and newly paved road,
and the larger, slower change
that is exponential,
that strangeness, like the unanticipated face
of my aunt, shrunken and perversely stylish
under the turban she wore after chemotherapy.
But mostly it's the wait, one wait after another,
and I'm dropping back deep in the secondary
under the chill and pipe smoke of a canceled October
while the sweep rolls toward me from the line of scrimmage,
and Myles Hammond, who will think too slowly
and turn his air force jet into the Arizona desert,
and Don Appleton, who will drive out on a country road
for a shotgun in his mouth, are cut down,
and I'm shifting on the balls of my feet,
bobbing and saving one nearly hopeless feint,
one last plunge for the blockers
and the ballcarrier who follows the sweep,
and it comes, and comes on.
FOR THOSE WHO MISS THE IMPORTANT PARTS
The year Truman fired MacArthur
my uncle returned
from the hospital at Decatur,
his left hand torn
from the wrist, milled
into a ghostly bin
of Martha White Self-Rising Flour.
While Oscar Garrett ranted,
"We ought to get the bastards
before they get the bomb,"
and his wife, Mildred, went
to the kitchen for more custard,
the blue stump slipped out
of its flannel sleeve,
puffy and knuckled
like the head of a cottonmouth.
I didn't know pain had a phantom,
a thorn, like frostbite,
that ran long and clean
to the bone of emptiness.
I don't know yet whether
the coal stove or shame
flushed my father's face
with roses. While important
history went on elsewhere,
while the tough March wind
punched the window frames
and kicked at the glass bulb
in the heel of the thermometer,
my father and uncle were
almost as old as I am now.
Now I wish I were Li Po
with a Yangtze and plum blossom
to praise, with a poem
hard as jade to lay
on the threshold of annihilation.
If MacArthu
r had marched into China,
the map would still be yellow,
or I would not remember
so much my uncle's good hand
cold on my brow, and how my eyes
fell then, out of shyness,
running along the floorboards,
passing over his brown shoes,
over the knots
with their difficult wings.
I FIND JOY IN THE CEMETERY TREES
I find joy in the cemetery trees.
Their roots are in our hearts.
In their leaves the soul
of another century is in ascension.
I hear the rustling of their branches
and watch the exhausted laborers
from the Burgreen Construction Company
sit down in the shade,
unwrapping their ham and salami
and popping open their thermoses.
Apparently, they too are enamored
at the edge of our cemetery.
They are stretching twine, building a wall
as though this could be contained.
Probably they do not think
of our grandmothers who are pierced,
and probably they do not want
to hear about Thomas Hardy,
who, if I remember, has been dead
longer than they have been alive,
and who gave to the leaves of one yew
the names of his own dead. Anyway
the only spirits I can call in this place
are the stench of a possum
suppurating in secret weeds
and the flies, who are marvelous
because their appetite is our revulsion.
Let the laborers go on. Right now
I wish I could admire the trees simply
for their architecture. All winter
the dying have set their tables
and now they are almost as black
as the profound waters off Guam.
A few minutes ago, when they started
in a slight breeze off the lake,
the many and patient sails,
I could see in those motions
a little of the world that owns me—
and that I cannot understand—
rise in its indifferent passion.
THOREAU
It is when I work on the old Volvo,
lying on my back among the sockets,
wrenches, nuts, and bolts,
with the asphalt grinding the skin
over my shoulderblades, and with the cold grease
dripping onto my eyeglasses,
that I think of Thoreau
on his morning walks around the pond,
dreaming of self-sufficiency.
I think of the odometer that shows
eight circuits of the planet.
I drop the transmission and loosen
the bolts around the bellhousing.
I take it in both hands, jerk,
and it pops like a sliced melon.
Carefully, so I won't damage
the diaphragm, I remove the clutch
and place it on a clean cloth
beside the jackstand. I look
at the illustrations in the manual
and I think of the lists that Thoreau made.
By the time I get to the flywheel,
grease is clotted in my hair,
my knuckles are raw and bleeding
against the crankcase, and I am thinking
of civil disobedience. I am looking
up into the dark heaven of machinery,
the constellations of flaking gaskets,
and I am thinking of Thoreau's dry cow,
of his cornstalks splintered by hail.
THE FIRST BIRTH
I had not seen before how the body opens,
the petals of liver, each vein a delicate bush,
and where something clutches its way into the light
like a mummy tearing and fumbling from his shroud.
The heifer was too small, too young in the hips,
short-bodied with outriggers distending her sides,
and back in the house, in the blue Giants of Science
still open on my bed, Ptolemy was hurtling toward Einstein.
Marconi was inventing the wireless without me.
Leonardo was secretly etching the forbidden anatomy
of the Dark Ages. I was trying to remember
Galen, his pen drawing, his inscrutable genius,
not the milk in the refrigerator, sour with bitterweed.
It came, cream-capped and hay-flecked, in silver pails.
At nights we licked onions to sweeten the taste.
All my life I had been around cows named after friends
and fated for slaughterhouses. I wanted to bring
Mendel and Rutherford into that pasture,
and bulb-headed Hippocrates, who would know what to do.
The green branch nearby reeked of crawfish.
The heavy horseflies orbited. A compass, telescope,
and protractor darted behind my eyes. When the sac
broke, the water soaked one thigh. The heifer lowed.
Enrico Fermi, how much time it takes, the spotted legs,
the wet black head and white blaze. The shoulders
lodged. The heifer walked with the calf wedged
Did I ever go back to science, or eat a hamburger
without that paralysis, that hour of the stuck calf
and the unconscionable bawling that must have been a prayer?
Now that I know a little it helps, except for birth
or dying, those slow pains, like the rigorous observation
of Darwin. Anyway, I had to take the thing, any way
I could, as my hands kept slipping, wherever it was,
under the chin, by tendony, china-delicate knees,
my foot against the hindquarters of the muley heifer,
to bring into this world, black and enormous,
wobbling to his feet, the dumb bull, Copernicus.
A HISTORY OF SPEECH
That night my sophomore date wanted kisses.
I talked instead of the torn ligaments
in my ankle, crutches and Ace bandages,
parading like any arthritic
the exotic paraphernalia of my suffering
and, that failing, went further, bobbing
in the thesaurus of pain: the iron lung,
the burn, torture with water and bamboo.
She twisted a frosted curl around one finger.
It was then she touched the skin along my neck.
It was then I noticed for the first time
the strange wing beating in my mouth
and kissed her in a kind of flight
that plummeted and searched for branches.
Ah, but Tahiti of a thousand Tahitis!
Among the suckling cars of the drive-in,
trays of pomegranates, lingerie of surf.
Days I hurled papers onto the porches of invalids.
June nights I only had to open my mouth,
out came a flock of multicolored birds,
birds of all denominations and nationalities,
birds of nostalgia, the golden birds of Yeats,
birds trained in the reconnaissance of exclusive buttons.
Before I knew it I was twenty-two.
I was whispering into the ear of Mary,
the mother of Jesus. I was dreaming
in two languages I did not understand.
I was sitting in the bar of the Cotton Lounge,
railing against George Wallace, when the fist
rang in my stomach and I looked up
to a truck driver shouting down at me,
"Talk too much!" Talk too much into greasy
footprint, linoleum stinking of
beer,
the thigh of that woman rising to leave.
Talk too much and understand I'm not to blame
for this insignificance, this inflation
in the currency of language. Listen:
whenever I hurt, the words turned their heads;
whenever I loved too much, they croaked and hopped away.
At my luckiest, I'm only saying the grace
the hungry endure because they're polite.
Learning speech, Demosthenes put pebbles in his mouth,
but my voice is haunted by softer things.
THE LAUNDROMAT AT THE BAY STATION
When the separation hit me with its tonnage, self-soiling, guilt,
I used to go there, having no other choice, void of the machinery
of renewal,
carrying a pillowcase of spoiled shirts slung over one shoulder, bundling
in a mildewed towel my knot of blue jeans, underwear, and dirty
sheets, my legacy, my impossible dowry.
I think I had never been so lonely, and the girl Shirley, acned,
leafing through a magazine of teenage stars, who gave change
in the Kwik-Mart next door when the change machines were broken,
seemed either
contemptuous or flirtatious, hot-tempered, feigning an incredible wound.
I could hear the cycles kick on and off and, underneath, the
continuous roar
of water surging up from the valves, and I remember, once I was inside,
how the dark outside would grow rigid, as though I had entered,
after all of Oklahoma, the green and narcotic light of a truckstop
restroom—
the rubber dispensers on the wall, the mirrors that magnify the pores.
Most of the customers I don't remember, but I can't forget
the divorcées in tight black stretch pants, cautiously sorting their lace
panties, talking too loud
and pulling their stringy, cotton-headed kids out of the garbage pails,
whole families, sallow and almost retarded, and improbable younger
girls,
big blondes who seemed to leap out of the rain, their hair frosted and
piled high on their heads,
their spike heels clicking on the linoleum tiles gummy with diet soda.
It hurts me, that separateness, and how I lived then, mostly in one
room, my bed a delirium of books,