what probably happened and who was involved.
I am not saying who. I am saying probably.
AVUNCULAR
He told us lust would turn, transmogrify
to a plural version of mother love.
Friendship improved on that. A few
at sixty would give more
than they kept for themselves.
But parents, they had an expiration
date, like fish or milk.
They were like Jehovah with Jesus.
One day they looked up
and their duties were done.
How late he saw his orphan's portion of light.
And the spiritual life was surrogate.
Pacifiers and placebos. Only
perspective had meaning now.
Space-time, the anti-hubris, the hope
he might still marry,
if General Electric stayed up,
and become
some fifty-five-year-old's smiling
eighty-seven-year-old son-in-law.
THE STATE-LINE STRIPPER
I got lost
At a family picnic for the employees
of Martha White Self-Rising Flour.
Two lovers found me down by the Tennessee River,
a little fat girl
crying into the lichen on a stone's face,
and took me to the grandstand—
Embarrassing—
I got lost. And then I lost my fear.
Strangers and high places
and nightly publishing myself
naked except for a fireman's hat
I danced and Jehovah's Witnesses
came unglued in the parking lot.
My creation was like the earth's.
In the beginning there was shame,
then the body after shame,
dangerous happiness—
If I could remember how I got here
I wouldn't be lost.
Yet my body recommends me.
All that I promised that I would not do, I did.
I got over my fear of darkness
when it seemed to me anything out there
would probably be better
than what shone here in the light
THE LOW-DOWN-SORRY RIGHT-WING BLUES
Not to be all things at once, but one sort or another,
a broker or systems analyst, may disappoint your mother,
but what luxuries accrue from playing a sure part:
shots of single-malt scotch and peg-hung copper pots
instead of doubts bubbling like newts in a cauldron.
A no-brainer keeps the beat. Hard to feel bad. Hard to feel bad.
Yet kitchen millionaires can't duck poverty's spirit
by fluffing superior crepes. Imagination is not experience.
The crop-duster drunkenly buzzing the country club,
the guidance counselor flashing her boobs in church:
these are inspirations, at least as much as popes
and principals. Even our Person of the Year,
the cardiothoracic surgeon who mans her own plane
and first violin in the orchestra, must sometimes itch
to botch a job. For ruin and the soul are involved.
Bums in their cardboard boxes are miserable. All right
But only one can qualify as worst The rest have failed
at being failures: alone with the gold in their mouths,
or gathered in caucuses of their commiserating
philosophy: Sorry. Sorry for what's done badly
or not done well, and sorry is what conservatives feel,
though they call it regrets and send it out in cards
that suggest the opposite. Christians who love
the blood-and-guts Leviticus-Yahweh more than Christ,
effective people, business leaders—still, they are sorry.
Welfare royalty light crack pipes with their tax dollars.
The best parties are always in the smallest houses.
FEARS
They are like clouds on days
when there are no clouds, or flat
characters in works of fiction.
We go past them, knowing
that they stand near, breathing
but not fully vested, hovering
just shy of the third dimension,
traced lightly in pencil. That
they may have saved us once
from childhood embarrassment
or cauterized an ideal with a kiss
in no way qualifies them
for perennial attention. Go past.
Turn the page with a decided swish.
But as they live, I vouch for them:
the anonymous, the invisible—
these who have lost everything.
For them the bombs are not real.
They believe only in history.
They have no impression
that they leave an impression.
COMMON-LAW KUNDALINI
A sudden loving settles into your own weight...
click, then roll over onto your back
and you are there above yourself,
the human spirit in full cloud-drift,
a lust fieldstripped to eye and ambition
which moves through walls and doors
and rises to the carnival of looking down
with no power but that of seeing
all of it momentarily unchangeable:
the shadow-tinseled moonlit fields
and silvery water towers on stilts,
the vole in the unblinking talon of the owl.
Even better, asleep, in dream-buoyancy,
I have seen more than I ever saw
pretzel-munching in some cloud valley
thirty thousand feet above the sorghum.
Once a pelican stopped to question me.
Once my friend Herbert McAbee
bumped into me out of the mist
with a talking sheep under his arm.
Often I have achieved much in basketball,
for many dream flights launched
from the magic floor of some actual gym
where old men smoked by a potbellied stove,
but removed from time, unblocked,
and watched by sweethearts, cheered,
I rose and dunked and hovered
with fear's iodine in my throat.
When I am up there, it is not poetry.
In the dream's onliness, it feels
wingless, bird-elegant, experimental,
requiring the decisionless decision-
making of dreams. But somehow,
why do I do this if not for the freedom?
Sometimes I wish I had never heard
of the name of Sigmund Freud.
SITTING WITH OTHERS
The front seats filled last. Laggards, buffoons,
and kiss-ups falling in beside local políticos,
the about to be honored, and the hard of hearing.
No help from the middle, blenders and criminals.
And the back rows: restless, intelligent, unable to commit
My place was always left-center, a little to the rear.
The shy sat with me, fearful of discovery.
Behind me the dead man's illegitimate children
and the bride's and groom's former lovers.
There, when fights were lowered, hands
plunged under skirts or deftly unzipped flies,
and, fights up again, rose and pattered in applause.
Ahead, the bored practiced impeccable signatures.
But was it a movie or a singing? I remember
the whole crowd uplifted, but not the event
or the word that brought us together as one—
One, I say now, when I had felt myself many,
speaking and listening: that was the contradiction.
THANKSGIVING IN THE LATE FIFTIES
Hunting while the women cooked,
then coming in to the set table,
we took our sedative turkey
arguing politics and religion.
What waited after dessert:
dishes for them, and for us,
the Redskins and Cowboys.
The way women saw it
(while pregnancies condensed
in the kitchen and two-year
huffs spun from comments
on screen-wire permanents)
men were more predictable:
fourth-quarter cold warriors,
dozing together in the den,
fluttering like a string of bream.
ON TORTURE
My people corrected children
as they had been corrected:
mildly—
with switches and words,
never obscenities, more tones
of rebuke and disappointment
Worse happened, welts
and salt baths, forced
wakefulness, electroshock—
genuine tortures, abuses.
We were aware of these.
Three houses down the road,
Charles, the homicidal
eight-year-old chain smoker,
mentioned a Louisville Slugger.
That might have been a joke—
the two faces of distance
like pleasure and his words for it
Dirty words, what else?
Lord Therapy, arraigner
and creator of memories,
when did the truth ever
have anything to do with words?
COURTSHIP
How much medication human mating requires
in the United States, in the twenty-first century,
gallons of beer and rum, kilos of hash and marijuana,
all to dispel the counsel of parents, and priests, and mirrors,
so every Bev and Bill can function as healthy adult creatures
and touch one cape of their erotic destiny.
And if the act succeeds, it replicates in more
and more fluent instances with ever less potent dosages.
And if it fails, the same drugs may aid in forgetting,
or multitask as anodyne and aphrodisiac
as ever so gently begin to billow the sails
of the ship of addiction on its ancient voyage to Mars
with the standard license issued by Venus.
Gallons of beer and rum, kilos of hash and marijuana—
Jesus is little help. He circles like a vulture.
Do you have baggage? the bellboy in hell asks,
and it is a suitcase Flannery O'Connor packed:
miscellaneous hair and skin and body parts—
the brain of one lover, the legs of another.
Funny, but very sad too, to love jealously
and know oneself unworthy of love, or not to love
and suffer for having to hurt a friend.
And crazy, isn't it, crazy love, when lovers drag each
other off like bones, and when they run to fat?
Dumped, they starve themselves beautiful again,
and, eventually, they talk, as all the tortured do,
"What kind of children would we have together?"
And they see them then: their future offspring in tiny
black robes, the justices of their supreme fun.
THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE
It has taken thirty-five years to be this confident
of what happens between the noun and the verb.
Eventually, love goes. The image. Then the thought
No? Then you are still alive. Only a little. And then,
I do not mean to depress you. Men have to hear
before they see. Sacred vows. Dropped shirts.
Women do not speak to men. They are overheard.
Sadness mounts people. Around the burn-scar high
on one thigh, the body of the beloved will vanish.
And the come cries and salt hair-smells of lovemaking.
Secret fiction, holy matrimony, longest short story,
the troth two lovers pledge to one another is none
of the president's business, let him say what he wants.
He is no good with words. Ask any true lesbian.
He should take a poetry workshop with Adrienne Rich.
He should try using the world less and words more.
POSTMODERN CHRISTIANS
Men with holes in their heads,
children with gouged-out eyes,
with ripped-out tongues
in silent attempts at prayer.
Our mother who art in heaven,
why is there no gentleman
of sorrows of perpetual suffering?
Little boys need smaller fathers
than Mohammed, Moses,
Jesus Christ, and Joseph Stalin.
Little girls who blow themselves up
should never be referred to
as cowards or martyrs.
Men and women become ideas badly,
but the soul is a good idea,
even if it is not original or real.
The angels come to comfort us,
mother superior of agony,
because we know, every one of us,
only the unborn will judge us,
and they can't tell the difference
between a lifeboat and a leak.
MY FATHER'S BIG IDEA
A stand of walnuts, by the board foot, would grow a fortune
in eighty years if one had the patience to wait
or knew descendants would hold the plantation.
But the land we inherit will be subdivided.
The farmer tenant who works it now can't afford it.
The man who will, who owns the rest home
and miles in every direction, has his bid sealed.
His mother, Alice, taught me in fourth grade.
He started as a bagger at a grocery, worked hard,
and bought the store, and then the home,
and now the county. For her I once crafted
a perfect to-the-scale replica of a log cabin.
Or more to the point, I boxed and turned it in.
It made, beside others, a frontier village,
a miniature Williamsburg, built by fathers.
Did she keep them? No one ever said to pick them up.
But thirty cabins a year for forty years?
Twelve hundred cabins, a metropolis larger
than our town, which disappeared, not
at once, but slowly, the way a walnut grows.
A thread goes back, the fiber optics of nostalgia.
But we are better off without land or farms.
No woman with one arm has to milk a cow.
No man has to follow a mule to a coronary.
My father says, One tree: six thousand dollars.
Eighty years, two hundred acres, twenty trees
an acre—I crunch the numbers Alice taught me.
At fifty, I see what my father saw. Walnuts
instead of shopping malls; trees, then furniture.
Dead, I am worth twenty-four million dollars.
But where does vision stop? Accounting?
How much is little? How poor does honesty go?
Alice Summerford, who furnished my mind,
liked to sit in the office of the rest home and read
Laura Ingalls Wilder during the last years of her life,
When I would visit, she remembered books I read
that seemed to connect things—money and family,
present and past, sons and fathers—a good
teacher, a great American perhaps, the first
to tell me I was adopted though I was not adopted.
IN HIGH SCHOOL
We learn so much. And to what end? To make money
Being very good at something? To understand nature?
In nature, cl
assroom equals captivity, spelling optional.
My class came out factory workers, truck drivers, teachers—
teaching, the one behavior teaching naturally teaches.
Teachers lionize Creativity, the common origin.
But study art and find the underground, the slums
of self-addiction, where self-expression matters.
Everyone else learns wolfing mush and following.
In gym class coed basketball, learn rebound, defend,
and pass. Forgo the shot Those girls in the bleachers
have their periods but not too often. Gym teachers
hope delaying scrimmage will control boys the way
civics instructors plot to fend off natural history
with current events. Questions? Maybe two
more years of backward looks; then forget books.
Meanwhile, mark civics, p.e., and driver's ed instructors:
if these coach badly, they may evolve to principals