the aboard-saying panic and subliminal love sigh
of the greased consonants turning among vowels.
"Stretch out," they seem to say, "lay it all down
here in the seeds of the twenty-first century,
in the United States of America," and, "Baby, baby."
5
The great man, head like a cauliflower, addressed our poems
Thursday mornings, pontificating between coughing jags.
And what he said: "History includes you in this small way."
And what he meant: "Don't wake me up."
He who had sat with Cummings, Hart Crane, and Pound.
And what he remembered of all his time with Eliot:
"He never said anything stupid. He never made a mistake."
"Why are you doing this?" I asked, the one time we were alone.
"I'm giving my wife a horse or a swimming pool."
Cummings was a gentleman. Pound was genuinely batty
and believed himself Christ. Randall was jealous of Cai.
"Cai should be exonerated for what he's writing now."
He skewered Mallarmé: "A short poet with a long tail."
Then hacked at himself: "A quarrel with imitations."
He liked my poems best. Not much. I asked one other thing:
"After all these years, and books, what do you think of poetry?"
"I loathe and detest it."
6
The dead, when they are recent, are as good
as they will ever be. They do not bicker
or take the biggest share. They he in state,
as well groomed and polite as ambassadors.
Done with the future, they hold to the past.
Soon enough it will be different, heavenly host,
God's moles, God's worms, God's nematodes,
Gabriels and Saint Peters of putrefaction: hello.
Blooms praise meat. But now an interlude. Now,
as never in elegies, the living prefer the living.
7
My father, for all my childhood, would oppose
my sighs as others might object to profanity.
If I had finished splitting a pile of logs
or loading a truck of hay into the barn,
I had only to lean back, inhale a great gulp
of air, and expel it with an undiminished whew,
and there he was like Marcus Aurelius.
Long I held tight, but now I give out
and go down the cleansing breath
dead-legged and bath-headed with joy.
8
Let loose. Lists into ashes. Tasks into stones.
Do the dead still dispatch scouts? Only
lunatics see angels. Surrealism's old-timey.
After fifty, the men in my family doze off,
even passionately making a point, intensity
of eyes coming down on you like a wake—
you start to answer, and we're off
in the slack-jawed, log-sawing sublime.
This clear gift descends on us like water.
Thunder brings out our highest power.
9
Release is better than ecstasy, downglide
peeled from the resistance of the living,
sockfoot in the meridian of twilight.
What picked the brain like a morel?
The honesty of things calls silently. Minutes
of committee meetings, doodlings
and scribblings make the soul's holy writ
The rain says, Go and study with the birds.
10
It doesn't take much. Beautiful platitude:
All is delusion. In the right dark,
and if you are ignorant, brother,
a goose sounds like a coyote.
I'm looking for something a wren will approve.
One leak from the unlockable sea.
What's truer than fiction when it moves?
The peach in my own armflesh
makes me an agent of the sublime.
New Poems (2005)
SALVATION BLUES
Many people here expect
the dead are not really dead.
Therefore, they resolve to live
as though they were not alive:
so softly the minor thirds,
so tenderly the major sevenths,
white gospel the elderly virgins
keep treading like chastity
until Franz Liszt, ravager
and destroyer of pianos,
critiques with a thunderstorm:
Remind us there is something
to be dead about. Play like
you are alive, even if it is not true.
THE ATTITUDE
We who have towed the burden share a kinship
we ditch diggers and box toters
we hammerers and assemblers
no matter if we work now
as architects or engineers
if we enter a room primed with statistics
or quote Lévi-Strauss to a graduate seminar
we feel the boss lurking
in the aisles between the machines.
No, we will say, if you ask, Nothing is wrong.
Unless we are dying, the doctor is our enemy.
If we have ever crawled into a cold furnace with a hacksaw
or squeegeed into a manhole
or perched over a river tying steel
or gouged septic gums with spitsucker
or stripped the sheets from the birthing bed
or shackled the mad onto a gurney
or staggered from a fire ripping at a mask,
do not speak to us
of Tasmanian emeralds
or libraries in Korea.
We would prefer hearing what comes easy,
the Powerglide at the core of the transmission,
the profit that greases the laws into being.
Rich and beloved, we remain shitheads.
Before birth, we were cheated
by slag pits and rhetoric and mosquitoes.
Do not write of us. We will not read it.
Write the prescription that will make us gentle.
The trucks are empty. The boxes are full.
Show us what help means.
ELVES
Where did elves come from?
a student asks, and John says,
From Germany, I think they come
from Germany. And childhood
fevers and tufts that thatch
the folds in an old man's ear.
On his ninety-fifth birthday
he began to remember what
he had never remembered:
a button on his mother's shoe,
the name of a neighbor's dog.
With faster eyes we might see them.
With medicine or sickness.
With malaria, I saw a wolf,
a wolf or a large cat: a cougar
or a leopard. I was never sure.
I go mindless in stairwells
and cloverleafs, the transport
out and the transport in. Now
I am withdrawing from nicotine,
a small elf, but gone in a fidget.
Gone the menagerie that chilled
and delivered me: the dog with
human eyes who explained
reincarnation; one silent dwarf;
and my personal beast, the troll.
Its favorite place was a bridge
near a school in North Alabama.
Elves prefer ancient elevators
that hang by a creaking cable
in a hotel of spiders and thieves.
They have tired of story circles,
of happy farms and children,
of being consulted and looked up
like footnotes or queries,
of vanishing deep in a book
Elves only have to hear the word
theme and they begin to tremble.
In the
ink that embalms
and makes them invisible,
their songs deaden to whispers.
From Germany, I think they come
from Germany, John said,
and the class resumed thinking
the thoughts that young people think
when not required to think.
Of beauty perhaps. Their own
and others'. And then jobs,
the bending work of the psyche,
all night and all day, forever,
hammers beating at the ore.
THE BOOMERS TAKE THE FIELD
It takes a long time to forgive
heroism or beauty.
And then the young girl
in the old song owns a plot
in the memorial gardens,
a brow full of Botox,
and a lover with Viagra.
The laps of the mythical
parents of World War II
and the Great Depression
have lithified to granite,
yet we remain childish.
In our fifties, we study ourselves
studying their violence.
Do they forgive us our graduations?
They got dark early—
so elegant in photographs,
but thin from hunger
as often as vanity.
We were lucky, they said.
We should have lived in the thirties.
No one could find a kid.
Occasionally they'd find
a little person and beat it
for impersonating a kid.
And if it cried,
they'd beat it again, harder,
and give it a pair of Lucky Strikes.
SOVEREIGN JOY
On the John Deere he felt inaugurated,
freshly minted, risen to eminence.
He could hit the left foot brake, square-
pirouette at the floodgate, and follow
the creekbank back to the barn. He knew
where liveth and when goeth and how
lift harrow and turn governor down.
He had studied paradise—this came close,
making a vow always to live right
and perfect corners he'd cheat by littles
until he went in an oval, round
and round, not seeing everything, but happy,
breaking ground, a farm boy with the Beatles
in his head, a young Baptist dancing.
THE UNITED STATES
If you asked what it is all about
I would say a field a green field
in the turning rows a killdeer
and after that barbed wire
the hedge with its cardinals
a blacktop then another field
Corn one of the main things
after water and before milk
for whiskey is in it and grits
gold for chickens pearls before swine
there is a factory in every plant
if we could be properly humble
it is the greatness of the nation
along with cartoon animation
automobiles and rock 'n' roll
jazz and basketball evolved here
but not one other U.S. God
just the corn's imperial row
on row then Sylvester Stallone
and airbrushed Elvis thank you
very much ladies and gentlemen
Presley Dylan and the Supremes
no I would say a field a vast field
at the center top-hogs and cattle
then art the cities New York
Chicago Houston Seattle man
told me last week experts can
teach starlings to talk hell
televangelists may yet witness
in terza rima each stalk of corn
contributes it has been so
hybridized with its immense
ears it no longer resembles
maize it is what we have left
to barter for oil and microchips
tons of it siloed and elevated
to float us through droughts
and wars and speculations we ask
which most cogently represents us
Leaves of Grass or The Simpsons
there is the idea that every
living thing is a subset of human
control and the other notion
that though we may go on
a few hundred or thousand
years the poison has spilled
no more land will be made
the search for another arable
planet may prove moot as the
search for earthly sentience
meanwhile this taco here
things we persist one people one
of the potential fates of corn
MY MONASTERY
I saw a good deal of life.
Then I went into the university—
hallways, laboratories, books of the desire
to change government or art.
Very smart people, politically
committed, involved
with the latest theories, ambitious,
but as they aged, bitter, without purpose.
What had I thought on entering?
First, no more manual labor.
Second, all those nubile girls
at their maximum wildness and felicity.
Also the mean God of stupid people,
the divine thug, bigot, xenophobe,
executioner, and extortioner,
turned from the place in disgust
I heard many opinions expressed.
The career pacifists, the Marxist
castrati could not stop singing
of the horrendous male ego.
Finally, universities honored
and sanctioned indigent forms
of noncommercial crafts,
the still-bearing crops of the obsolete arts.
It was a great life among the scholars.
Before that, I knew mainly
working persons—pipefitters, hairdressers.
I saw most of the United States.
Then books. Then interminable rooms
of people staring into bright boxes.
Before that a smaller light shone.
It came from short books into long silence.
Then Boccaccio crawled from Eve's apple.
Now if the golden vultures of Fox News
will stop flapping their two right wings,
I can watch the liberal arts die in peace.
What are words? Words teach the soul
to remember, and what is unknowable.
Many philosophies rubbed against my ear.
"You've been brainwashed," my aunt said.
She began that line when I learned the twist.
"Evil," she said, "sin." I think of her now
as my country lurches toward Baghdad,
big, dumb, smug, murderous, and born again.
WINTON AND MILDRED
Harlan Baker and Charles Palmer had Winton Byrd
out in the drying asphalt of the new tennis court
pretending to be a statue, and now as he began
to struggle, they laughed and yelled "Ree-tard."
Is that clear enough for you? Should I repeat it?
In those days, they didn't socially promote you.
You stayed in grammar school until you learned
to spell Bull Connor or you died of arthritis.
If it matters, some of us learned that some
of the dead mattered, and the rest stayed where
shit belonged, inside quotation marks or italics.
The intelligent were tricky; the stupid natural
surrealists, good-natured provocateurs of laughter.
Once when Winton was a fifteen-year-old fifth grader
dressed in a leopard-skin suit to impersonate a caveman
in the spring operetta, he came by the back steps
of the junior high school where I was beating
a piece of angle iron against the concrete
and asked if he could try it I let him then
and went on up to the seventh-grade classroom
where John Teague, professor of the facts of life,
comportment, and hygiene, told me to go on
outside, didn't I hear the bell, there was a fire alarm.
There was a fire alarm, and there came the truck,
And there came the principal, leading Winton
by his one spotted strap. Winton was a twin, almost
as good a thing to be as it was bad to be retarded.
If you were slow, the angels of orthodox sensitivity
who taught in the local public schools might,
after reading "The Tortoise and the Hare,"
assign you to the Turtles reading group,
but they would not separate twins. Did you ever
hear someone spell out something in front of you
so you would not know what they were saying?
When Winton's sister Mildred was fourteen and a fourth grader
she missed eighty-seven consecutive days of school,
and when she returned and the teacher asked what happened,
she answered, "I stubbed my toe." Mildred was not
a pretty young woman, but she was pretty enough.
I must be stupid too, because only today I figured out