Out of politeness, and asked an old man
Who was nearly deaf and dying of Hodgkin's disease,
"Do you want to wash your own local area?"
And getting no reply, asked again, louder this time,
"Would you prefer to do your own local area?"
At which he began to nod almost
Ecstatically, saying, "Dublin, Dublin."
3
The old people in the valley where I was born
Still held to the brogue, elisions, and coloratura
Of the Scotch-Irish, and brandished
Like guns the iffens, you'nses, and narys
That linked by the labyrinthine hollers
Of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains
The remnants of a people whose dominion
Obtained no less from unerring marksmanship
Than their spiteful resolve never to learn
Any tongue as remote as Greek or Latin,
Much less the Cherokee of Sequoya
That still haunted, like mist, the names of rivers.
"And there was May," my great-grandmother would say,
After May Collum's husband had been cut in half
At the sawmill, "lookin' like the hind wheels of destruction."
4
Country songs, sorghum, the odor of lard
That clung to coats, sweat and saliva roaring
Out of the varnish of old desks as the days
Heated up in late spring: it embarrassed me.
Until fourth grade, I spoke rarely, and then
With a hand cupped over my mouth, I began
To funnel sideways to my friends, as I write
Now in poems, the advantage of poems
In North America being that few will read
Who do not agree that the one in front of us all
Is dotard or tyrant, though at that time,
All the time I was learning the telling of time,
The names of county seats, and division,
I was blotching red with self-loathing,
And mumbling to mask the raw carcass
Of the mispronounced deep within myself,
Which was only the accent of the dying
Language of my South, which is a defeated country.
5
We're riding in the blue Oldsmobile.
Marvin's talking, telling the story
Of the tongue-tied butcher. He's
Working in the back of his shop,
Going with a cleaver at a side of beef
When another tongue-tied guy comes in:
"Cunh me a wump woast when you get tine."
"Fuh wih me you sumbith, I cunya head off."
6
Do you know who this is? the e-mail begins
As it has begun at least four times in the past
Three years, contemporary enigma, without
Accent or signature, only that once
We knew each other, though the language
Is too vague to suggest if we had been colleagues,
Neighbors, or lovers. Do you know who this is?
I know what it is to speak without knowing
How it will be received, to take a number,
To sway in a long-decadent tongue as on
A hammock stretched between two pining
Consonants, to audit the gross diphthong,
To pray Do you know who this is?, to sound
The vowels where the bodies are buried,
To be nourished by suspense, to emit
Unconsciously the still audioactive rhetoric
Of dead generals, to he, to know yourself
The instrument and not the song, to wait
For the question Do you know who this is?
And not to answer, to become that very one—
Anonymous, everyone's favorite poet
Because there is no profit in it and no ego.
7
When Big Jim Folsom ran for governor of Alabama
A gospel quartet rode in the bus with him, and before
He made the speech he always made,
They would stand on the platform and croon
The song he came to be known for, "Ya'll Come."
He promised to pave the roads, and he did,
And when he ran again, he said, "Before
My first term, I promised to pave the roads,
And I did. This time, I'm holding back one share
For keeping my word," and they elected him, and he did.
He drank, cussed, and philandered. Six foot seven,
Knowing himself, history. And the third time he ran,
A reporter in Birmingham said, "Govunah,
It ha' been repoated that last Sairday night
In Huntsville you slep wi' a nigra womah."
And Big Jim answered, "That's a damn lie,
Manufactured by unscrupulous demagogues
Who have little or no regard for decency,
Mudslingers who wouldn't square the truth
If it up slap and bit 'em. I didn't sleep a wink."
8
I don't know what to say either. Eether/eyether.
"Don't make fon of me. I'm dead."
"You talk differnt. Where you from?"
John Brown asked Gloria—
Five years ago, cloudless Alabama day,
Us returning him to the trailer
From his job mowing the cemetery—
"El Salvador."
"Well, I ain't never been down
There in South Alabama."
9
Some kind of hippie cowboy on the elevator
Going up in the Music City Days Inn,
He's apologizing for his pink hardshell
Guitar case jammed in the closing door,
Thanks, and he's gone, the only white
Man I've heard speaking the hoarse,
Barreled-in English of a native of India.
Later, in the lobby, more cowboys,
Chaws in their mouths like extra molars,
Rhinestone collars, tight black jeans,
Luminous belt buckles, big fellows,
Talking Russian. This is Nashville,
Shrunken world, a hundred twenty miles
North of home. Anna Karenina,
Meet Minnie Pearl. At the bar
Of Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, where
All the rednecks used to dress like Johnny
Cash or Patsy Cline when they came
To be discovered, I stand a welcome toast
To the new line of wannabes: Yoruba
Dolly Partons, Cuban Robert Frosts.
10
Sometimes in one summer, one would hear,
In one family, four or five distinct accents:
Low-country mushmouth; mountain twang;
The almost r-less river-talk of merchant planters,
Droned out and of a lazy kinship to the sleek,
Ambidextrous blackspeak of their former slaves;
And the hated northun brogue, smuggled
Back from Dee-troit to parlay credit on a half
Pound of bologna and a box of Velveeta cheese.
Sometimes all of it perched there on one voice,
All the instruments in the symphony
Swaying on the skinny fife of a Scottish reel—
Though the old stuck to their that theres,
Their this hairs, iffens, you'nses, and narys—
Murtis, this hair's my naiphew Graig—
A sentence that, except for the drawled-out
Eccentricities of the rhythms of that place
Between the Sand Mountain Plateau
And the Tennessee River, harbored
Only a hair shallower in the mouth than
The London cockney of a Lebanese immigrant
11
When the Mongols conquered the Chinese
The males imitated them by wearing their pigtails
And adopting their every custom
Until, after centuries, the Mongols
Who were not married or settled
Lost their place, turned tail,
And fled back into the mountains,
Leaving the pigtail and certain words
That remain chiefly unremarked on,
And persist, like the classic poets
In the south of the North American continent
After two thousand years—just think
Of the ones who answer to Virgil and Homer.
12
In a recording of Faulkner's speech,
The words wallow and hover: endyuah
In a line all to itself, prevaiah like Isaiah
Salted and drying behind the tongue—
Just words—no human but the language
Grinding at the shackle of the quotation.
One way to learn a language might be
To forget yourself, ape everything you hear.
Another would be to shut up and listen.
When the line first stretched to our house
And my mother answered the telephone,
I could tell, from her emphasis of consonants
And the tincture and nasality of her vowels,
If she was talking to Grace or Modena,
A habit I hated in her the way I hated
In the exaggerataed drawl of country singers
What I took for false emphasis, a pandering
To the cheap seats. Probably,
In retrospect, the way she carried on
With friends rooted closer to the mother tongue,
While the formal, slightly stiff constructions
And Latinate diction she typically used at home
Characterized the language of the country
Where she dreamed my sister and I would live,
Behind white fences, listening to Debussy
And reading Goethe and Shakespeare.
Though also she told the story of an uncle
Who, as a boy, mistook the meaning
Of sophistication for constipation,
A parable, perhaps, on the fantasy of diction.
She repeated it so often, it began to move
Like a rattletrap with kids hanging from
The windows, and many drivers.
"And how are you constipated ladies
Doin' this morning?" the punch line
Would go, and all of us would laugh.
Particulars, she would say to my sister
When she took a bath. "Don't forget
To bathe your particulars," because
The word vagina embarrassed her.
I feel odd hearing a tape of my own voice
That marks wherever I go, the sound
Of lynchings, the letters of misspellings
Crooked and jumbled to dupe the teacher,
Slow ink, slow fluid of my tribe, meaning
What words mean when they are given
From so many voices, I do not know myself
Who is speaking and who is listening.
THE ASSAULT ON THE FIELDS
It was like snow, if snow could blend with air and hover,
making, at first,
A rolling boil, mottling the pine thickets behind the fields,
but then flattening
As it spread above the fenceposts and the whiteface cattle,
an enormous, luminous tablet,
A shimmering, an efflorescence, through which my father
rode on his tractor,
Masked like a Martian or a god to create the cloud where
he kept vanishing;
Though, of course, it was not a cloud or snow, but poison,
dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane,
The word like a bramble of black locust on the tongue,
and, after a while,
It would fill the entire valley, as, one night in spring,
five years earlier,
A man from Joe Wheeler Electric had touched a switch
and our houses filled with light.
Already some of the music from the radio went with me
when the radio was off.
The bass, the kiss of the snare. Some of the thereness
rubbing off on the hereness.
But home place still meant family. Misfortune was a well
of yellowish sulfur water.
The Flowerses lived next door. Coyd drove a road grader
for the county.
Martha baked, sewed, or cleaned, complaining beautifully
of the dust
Covering her new Formica counters. Martha and Coyd,
Coyd Jr., Linda, and Jenny.
How were they different from us? They owned a television,
Knew by heart each of the couples on Dick Clark's
American Bandstand.
and unfrettable Silvertone guitar
While he pitched from the top of his wayward voice
one of a dozen songs
He'd written for petulant freshman girls. "Little Patti,"
"Matilda,"
"Sweet Bonnie G." What did the white dust have to do with anything?
For Junior, that year, it was rock 'n' roll; if not rock 'n' roll,
then abstract expressionism—
One painting comes back. Black frame. Black canvas—
"I call it Death" he would say,
Then stomp out onto the front lawn to shoot his .22 rifle
straight into the sky above his head.
Surely if Joel Shapiro's installation of barbed wire and
crumbled concrete blocks,
In a side room of the most coveted space in Manhattan,
pays homage
To the most coveted space in Manhattan, then Junior
Flowers's Death,
Hanging on a wall dingy with soot in North Alabama,
is a comment, too.
Are they the same thing? I do not know that they are not
the same thing.
And the white dust, so magical, so poisonous: how does it
differ from snow?
As it thins gradually over many nights, we don't notice
it; once the golden
Carp have rotted from the surfaces of ponds, there is no
stench to it;
It is more of an absence of things barely apprehended,
of flies, of moths;
Until one day the hawks who patrolled the air over the chicken coops
are gone;
And when a woman, who was a girl then, finds a lump,
what does it have to do
With the green fields and the white dust boiling
and hovering?
When I think of the name Jenny Flowers, it is that
whiteness I think of.
Some bits have fallen to clump against a sheet of tin roofing
The tornado left folded in the ditch, and she stoops there
to gather
A handful of chalk to mark the grounds for hopscotch.
THE SORROW PAGEANT
High and higher, beyond Guadalajara, the agave queuing up the sierra
in diagonals strict as tombstones,
The road switchbacking to a narrow pass and threading to the next
range, a line of trucks ahead
Grinding up into the invisible distance, the Bondoed wrecker in front
of us, a wreck itself,
Gearing down with such gravity it seemed the whole load of bolts and
rusty rebar
Would come right back on us, there then. As the gorge thing of
postcard majesty and grandeur
Wallowed into clouds and reappeared in blowing pockets of clarity,
we jerked to a stop-
And-go, stop-and-go, the minutes stretching out, with now and then a
man in a cowboy hat leaping out
And stumbling quick to lift a hood and pour water into a boiling
radiator, before the traffic palsied like a needle
In the hands of an arthritic seamstress. We came bump through a
tunnel and there it was:
A tractor-trailer flipped on its side, and in the grass, blundering
through the cloud of our bedazzlement,
What seemed at least two hundred hogs: some lamed and hobbling in
circles; some kneeling
On broken gammons; and others, the gravely wounded, like pillows
drying on the rocks;
The dead—no one had laughed yet, no one had said a thing, the gape
like sunlight over everything—
"Because man is no longer a demigod," Joseph Wood Krutch wrote,
"tragedy, in the classical sense, can no longer be said to exist."
O friends, do you know how the curtain in the brain comes down, and
the part that will be played
By the public self primps for a moment: the phone on hold, the word
unsaid? Don't peek there
Where the half-dressed ego counts its aesthetic money: two hundred
hogs, two hundred Jews
On a train derailed on its way to a concentration camp, what the
image must mutate to
If it's going to be serious, if it's a scene for the stage, if it's just