conceptual art, an installation, a dance for radio—
The curtain goes up, two hundred cancan hogs who had gone riding
piggy-piggy on their way
To becoming the chorizo of Puerto Vallarta. Why did I sit there
stunned? Poor life, poor stumbling, doddering life!
Broken from its movable zoo and slaughterhouse bondage, so it was
going to be animation, was it?
One Claymation pig, so luscious and pink, like Kathleen Turner in
Body Heat, shimmied against our bumper,
And over there, blotto in the shade of a saguaro, W. C. Fields pigs,
Oliver North pigs.
What had we seen before that the rules of looking depended on?
Something from the beauty pageant,
Something for the newsroom that came in early on the wires and fell
behind car bombings and assassinations,
And turned, by midafternoon, to a thing casually remarked on, while
more glamorous sorrows,
Oil spills and hijackings, kept popping up until who would notice it?
One of the duds,
One of the sweet odalisques from Omaha who did a campy tap dance
but filled the swimsuit too full,
One of the Miss Congenialities of sorrow, perhaps to be lifted out
on a day
When nothing much happened and no one was running for office,
and held against
The lady who lived to one hundred and eleven by eating nothing but
fish and never taking baths,
And the extinction of the pine shrew. I wanted the world to see those
two hundred hogs.
God rest their souls, I wanted to say. God bless their gouged hocks and
torn trotters. God bless the driver,
Dazed but still alive, standing off to the side with peasants who eyed
it all, feigning an air of companionable tragedy,
But wondering no doubt if the meat would keep and how to get it
home to adobe huts where,
Since they had their own TVs, they might learn how today a bus full
of nuns had tumbled
Down a ravine, or in some far-off and almost unheard-of country,
another monomaniacal pacifist was deposed.
I hoped they were the kind of men who saw the sweet humor, who
still believed in fate as perfect expression,
That before they ate, they would give thanks for the phenomenon, for
the miracle of those pigs.
BLESSED ASSURANCE
Never, a brilliant woman told me, trust a man
Who has not been beaten. He will lack compassion.
I wondered, Could that be true? Exactly what
Did beaten mean? To look up at a brute
With his arm pinning your neck to the pavement
And plead to be let up, or to have taken
Crap year after year, until the countless small
Arrearages of spite had mounted sufficient gall
To sponsor a shit job that would rent a box
Between a fish market and a muffler shop?
While I chewed this mute host of questions
(what was meant by trust, and what, compassion?),
She drove and talked. I sat and listened,
Just old enough to conjure what had happened
With one man to make her think all men cads
By nature, only weakened to charitable acts
By a father's indifference or a mother's rage.
Did I think, too, of castration? In that age
The word bitch came pawing like a raccoon
At the garbage cans of young men's conversations.
And suspicions roared to mark the pratfalls
Of true love a man might suffer, if he lacked balls.
In all of manly silence there's a public caveat—
Not fists or threats, but what manhood's about:
Guard duty in our defeated warrior cult
Made me quiet and made the roadside clutter:
Wrecked cars in yards, chickens on porches,
Bams hardly distinguishable from churches
Where the minister's perpetually in trouble
For laying hands on a dimly languishing cousin.
I still defined cynic, all-seeing, half-listening,
Twenty years ago, as we rode to a poetry reading:
Our big day's mile-a-minute fields and rivers;
Between us, Diet Pepsi, octane of some wisdom
Of grandma's strained through Simone Weil—
But once I'd heard it clearly, another nail
In the coffin of things I'd secretly expected—
When Alabamians write the text on sexual
Harassment, the tide will be Good Breeding—
Best concentrate on poems I'd be reading.
Soon we'd reach a city, its theater like a cyst
On the old train station. Did poetry exist
Down there in lingering dreams of horses,
In songs from the radio, and sacred verses
Children recite in vacation Bible school?
Or would our poems strike the vagrant local
Soul like spiced tea and the word frisson,
Funded by the Tri-States Arts Commission,
And followed by "I liked the one about the time...,"
"I don't get it," and "Can't you make it rhyme?"
Down-home trust rhymes first with lust. Most
Live in private bewilderment, a kind of mist
Where stories keep bumping into questions:
That and religion's zodiac of generalizations
Comprise hick Zen and show how victims win.
But days don't end. They go on in the ruins
Of what's never trespassed, never spoken:
The good beating's southern as fried chicken.
Family or Christ may hide the chauvinist—
No southerner denies the bigotry of idealists.
From Kingdom of the Instant (2002)
A WHISPER FIGHT AT THE PECK FUNERAL HOME
1
No balm in heaven. Bone light. Things tick as they desiccate.
Immaterial who we were. Time narrows the hide to a strap—
Everything bound leaps once, and is free forever—
decay our fertilizer,
dissolution our daily bread.
Questions. Questions. Rain out there,
between here and the mountain.
Mist for the blind interpreter,
not here yet, maybe never.
But the body gets laid out by noon.
People like to have what is missing before them.
With ashes, you always worry, Are those the right ashes?
Corpse, I want to ask, silent mime,
are you packed?
The Ladies' Junior Auxiliary mans the train station.
What secret did you live out of like a suitcase?
2
Aunt Brenda took the spectacles out of a case
and placed them on the bridge of the nose.
Uncle Howard preferred
the unexpurgated face:
the valves of grief, just barely cocked, venting
a little into the overbearing politeness—
the formal versus the demotic,
the ancient grudge of the elder for the younger,
or Aristode and Plato
transmuted to a whisper fight,
sounding something like
kopasinkassubuk and hipatenudinsathat,
until I thought to go out
into the hall and thank the undertaker.
3
The Summerfords were there, and the Minters,
friends of a life in the country,
church dinners, weddings, and harvests,
children growing up and going away.
What have I grown up to "hate? Some
di
shonesty in myself that in others
I could not face. A "scene." A scandal.
The private moment in the public space.
It used to disturb me, at funerals,
most of the people seemed so happy—
the grandnephews grand-funking in the parking lot
and the parlor, full of emcees and raconteurs;
even the widow chuckling
as she dabbed at one eye—
everything part of some vast,
mildly brawling syndicate of hypocrisy.
4
In high school, I would scrawl in the margins of textbooks
parodies of country songs:
"Always an Undertaker, Never a Corpse,"
"The First Word in Funeral Is Fun."
But death is serious. Condolence is the joke.
The undertaker gives permanents.
He takes the bald men's hats.
Once, when I was a pallbearer at the funeral
of a homicide, I watched
an old man, squint-eyed and sunken-gummed,
lean down and with one
nail-blackened finger probe the putty over the brow
where the bullet had gone in.
At least we don't hollow them out, wind them with rags,
soak them in tar, then execute their wives and dogs
so they will not have to enter paradise alone.
5
The wisdom stories are so bleak. No strawberries.
One asterisk, from a journal:
June 17,1994,
the words
of Dr. Eugenia Poulos, she
was about to inject me with lidocaine:
Don't worry,
I'm a good number.
And another, later that week:
The secondhand word of God
must have been a wise man wisely lying.
He has turned around since dying.
6
What is the poetry of the world?
A wound and poultice.
An eavesdropper's serenade.
A shrug at Armageddon.
An obsolete love note
addressed to the vengeful cults
of longing and respectability.
Not music, not just music;
more like abandon.
The light of a conservatory
shining in the blueprint of a ruin.
7
Buddy Pittman, the undertaker, told me,
when he was fresh from mortuary school
and still alert to the possibility
of egregious error, he worked
the night shift, alone
among the steel tables,
and one night, nearly daybreak,
a body arrived.
If there was an accident and the doctors had to operate
but knew the patient would not survive,
when they shaved the head for surgery,
they would save the hair
in a manila envelope
to send later to the funeral home.
He told me this, smiling,
with the abiding confidentiality
of one who knows secrets
sometimes leak out into the open air
and get repeated, but he tells them
anyway, and they end up
on the Internet or in a poem,
for the world leaks.
And the corpse is always a local boy.
Had been celebrating high school
graduation, banana-strawberry daiquiris
fifty miles north,
and coming back, a head-on.
The familiar dry-county mortality.
They go out whole
and come back parts.
And you put them together the best way you can,
consulting as you work
the yearbook of the Tigers, or Devils, or Saints.
Fill in the gaps. Immaterial
what we were. The soul in heaven,
the body on earth. Labor
with putty and brush. Yeats's metaphor.
Makeup and art. All that work
for one performance and a matinee.
When Eunice came with the flowers—
the deceased was in her son's class—
she wanted a moment with the body alone.
Buddy must have waited like my students wait
as I read the poem of their life—
verdict, please, not critique. She was
a long time in there. Then said,
"You've done a wonderful job,
only Ronnie's hair was brown, not red."
8
The trick is always minimalism
and understatement, a sham
like civilization—
not the accurate representation
but one's own interpretation
modified by what one
imagines others expect,
a barely legible death
a paraphrase
most of the bereaved remember
him wearing into the home.
9
Before these words,
other words filled this page:
the aunt he never saw,
his mother's twin.
His mother. Dalliance,
encumbrance. A dot
of punctuation in the silent
history of maiden names.
His father married her,
pregnant with their second child,
on condition that she never speak
to her family again.
And that was Grandma Owen,
a vine, as I remember her in her dotage,
putting out the brown flower
of one hand.
Now I want something
that will stand for a man.
10
How strange our vision of another life,
even our own. The real life
storied to oblivion. The legend
nickeled-and-dimed by facts.
The cold eulogy works best, the painting with the fewest strokes,
the record, a verse or two, jokes
if the deceased was old, requiems for the young,
sometimes music, but never anecdotes.
He farmed and the farm got larger:
a natural Calvinist, in all things moderate,
work his middle name, husbandry his byword;
hated Wallace; admired more
than Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson
Adlai Stevenson,
that mild, unelectable man;
as an old man, loved girls, any girl,
modestly, with no trace of debauchery;
had been, in his younger days, a drinker,
a juror at the trial of the Scottsboro Boys.
What works always is silence. Never
imagine any truth desperate to be told.
Easy to love the world more than God.
11
They buried him with his spectacles off.
Closed the lid. Was.
I looked down at him. His or my bones.
I still eat at his table. For years I wore his shoes.
People like to have what is missing before them.
What temper he affected to hold.
He looked in death placid and composed as he had never been in life,
as if he had resumed thinking
the thought he was thinking before he was born.
SMALL LOWER-MIDDLE-CLASS WHITE SOUTHERN MALE
Missing consonant, silent vowel in everyone,
pale cipher omitted from the misery census,
eclipsed by lynchings before you were born,
it cannot even be said now that you exist
except as a spittoon exists in an antique store
or a tedious example fogs a lucid speech.
Your words precede you like cumulus
above melodrama's favorite caricatures.
In novels, you're misfit and Hogganbec
k;
in recent cinema, inbreeding bigotry
or evolving to mindless greed: a rancher
of rainforests, an alchemist of genocide.
You're dirt that dulls the guitar's twang,
blood-soaked Bible, and burning cross.
You cotton to the execution of retards,
revile the blues, and secretly assume
Lindbergh's underground America that sided
with the Germans in World War II.
Other types demand more probity;
you may be Bubbaed with impunity.
This makes some feel prematurely good.
They hear your voice and see Jim Crow.
But the brothers wait. Any brother knows
that there are no honorary negroes.
A DEFENSE OF POETRY
If abstract identity, philosophy's silhouette, authorless, quoted,
and italicized, governs by committee the moments