everything else on the floor—dishes, fishing tackle, wadded sheets of
typing paper,
the bedsprings leaning against one wall wired to a black-and-white TV.
Through the wall I heard arguments, then thuds, something heavy,
maybe chairs
being thrown, doors slamming, then the bass throbbing over the weeping.
That year filth was the ledger I kept, marking each shirt, each towel.
Now that I'm happy, I need illness or blows before the laundromat
rises from the ashes
of my fever and confusion, and I can tell my wife how I looked at this
one's thighs
or that one's enormous and floppy breasts as she knelt to take her sad
underthings
from the dryer; how much I wanted their vulnerability, their poverty
and hatred still to be there
once I was happier; and how much I wanted happiness then, even there,
smelling the faint and artificial odors of lemon blossoms, searching
the wire baskets
for the mates to mismatched socks, the crude angels of
embarrassment.
Almost a year and a half of my life has been blocked out, washed
clean, the disease
of the self quarantined, checked there, and I don't want to think
about the laundry spinning in each washer, the dryers stationed like
robots,
and the rejected people waiting, as though for a simple resurrection.
I don't want a new life spun clean of its dirt and chaos. The day my
wife's mother,
my wife, and I came down the mountain from Santa Tecla to La
Libertad,
I had been waiting for the river that runs through that place, even
with the war there,
the way the women, some with their blouses off, were sitting on the rocks
with baskets of laundry to be knuckled and scrubbed, the children
splashing in and out of the shallow green pools left in the dry season,
and stretched beside them the shirts for labor and the shirts for
dancing, the shirts for God
and the shirts for dying, all were whitening, were slowly drying
around their stains,
and the laughter and the Spanish came up to me through the almond
trees,
purely and without reason, rising on the small wind like birds.
THE MOSQUITO
I see the mosquito kneeling on the soft underside of my arm,
kneeling
Like a fruitpicker, kneeling like an old woman
With the proboscis of her prayer buried in the idea of God,
And I know we shall not speak with the aliens
And that peace will not happen in my life,
not unless
It is in the burnt oil spreading across the surfaces of ponds,
in the dark
Egg rafts clotting and the wiggletails expiring like batteries.
Bring a little alcohol and a little balm
For these poppies planted by the Queen of Neptune.
In her photographs she is bearded and spurred, embellished
five hundred times,
Her modular legs crouching, her insufferable head unlocking
To lower the razor-edge of its tubes, and she is there
in the afternoon
When the wind gives up the spirit of cleanliness
And there rises from the sound the brackish oyster and squid
smell of creation.
I lie down in the sleeping bag sodden with rain.
Nights with her, I am loved for myself, for the succulent
Flange of my upper lip, the twin bellies of my eyelids.
She adores the easy, the soft. She picks the tenderest blossoms
of insomnia.
Mornings while the jackhammer rips the pavement outside my
window,
While the sanitation workers bang the cans against the big truck
and shout to each other over the motor,
I watch her strut like an udder with my blood,
Imagining the luminous pick descending into Trotsky's skull
and the eleven days
I waited for the cold chill, nightmare, and nightsweat of malaria;
Imagining the mating call in the vibrations of her wings,
And imagining, in the simple knot of her ganglia,
How she thrills to my life, how she sings for the harvest.
FOR THE EATING OF SWINE
I have learned sloppiness from an old sow
wallowing her ennui in the stinking lot,
a slow vessel filled with a thousand candles,
her whiskers matted with creek mud,
her body helpless to sweat the dull spirit.
I have wrestled the hindquarters of a young boar
while my father clipped each testicle
with a sharpened barlow knife, returning him,
good fish, to his watery, changed life.
as she lay on her back, offering her soft belly
like a dog, the loose bowel of her throat
opening to warble the consonants of her joy.
I have learned lassitude, pride, stubbornness,
and greed from my many neighbors, the pigs.
I have gone with low head and slanted blue eyes
through the filthy streets, wary of the blade,
my whole life, a toilet or kitchen,
the rotting rinds, the wreaths of flies.
For the chicken, the cow, forgetfulness. Mindlessness
blesses their meat. Only the pigs are holy,
the rings in their snouts, their fierce, motherly indignation,
and their need always to fill themselves.
I remember a photograph. A sheriff had demolished
a still, spilling a hundred gallons of moonshine.
Nine pigs passed out in the shade of a mulberry tree.
We know pigs will accommodate
demons, run into rivers, drowning of madness.
They will devour drunks who fall in their ways.
Like Christ, they will befriend their destroyers.
In the middle of winter I have cupped my hands
and held the large and pliable brain of a pig.
As the fires were heating the black kettles,
I have scrupulously placed my rifle between pigs' eyes
and with one clean shot loosened the slabs
of side-meat, the sausages that begin
with the last spasms of the trotters.
O dolphins of the barnyard, frolickers
in the gray and eternal muck, in all your parts
useful, because I have known you, this is the sage,
and salt, the sacrificial markers of pepper.
What pity should I feel, or gratitude, raising you
on my fork as all the dead shall be risen?
TWO GIRLS AT THE HARTSELLE, ALABAMA, MUNICIPAL SWIMMING POOL
Too much of the country in their walk–
as though each struggled
against a tree at the center of her body,
or their bare feet were shoes
that didn't fit, poverty in every step,
in every move, deliberate
as footsteps in plowed fields,
through clots of local boys, up
slippery rungs to the high board,
their bodies oiled, flipping away
casually the menthol cigarettes,
tossing back their bleached hair,
both twelve or thirteen years old:
like old houses, like mothers
pitched forward into the wind,
entering the cold, strange waters.
DECADENCE
1
In the junque store the idlers were talking about p
rimitives,
how scarred wood can be steeped in dignity, how that subtle
patina
derives from hands, hands of the old, hands of the poor.
The hands of the dealer
were on the halltree, the cream separator, the set of burled,
chestnut tools, as he whispered, Williamsburg, Jamestown,
Monticello.
He was selling an incarnation of this country, not mere
furniture,
patched and splaying relics, like that pie safe, still hopeful
in its ugliness,
hewn crudely with a broadax, planed with bad iron for
temporary uses.
I could remember how, in my grandmother's attic, dirt daubers
would construct their nests along the pegs
of an unworkable loom, and how one residential cell at a time
would crumble,
dusting the human heirlooms stacked in boxes underneath:
delicate Japanese fans, mother-of-pearl combs, letters
from flung hamlets named for springs, groves, and crossroads.
Under the spectacles that I had found in a stray boot
a bleached calligraphy
yielded its covered-dish suppers, its gaggle of Sunday
visitations,
while time's odor, dull and implacable,
stirred from a sidesaddle hooked on a rafter–
redolence of an old horse as he is being led from his last
pasture.
Later, when the house was sold, the decadence broke out:
moths flopped sleepily from giant black trunks,
and spiders, those shrewd solicitors of corners, invaded
with light that leaked through shingle cracks,
gnawing the tablecloths, flawing the spokes of spinning wheels.
In the junque store
I could imagine the rage and falling away, the ordeal
of finishing and refinishing, the worship of smooth surfaces,
and the patient preservation of flaws. I could love things
for hands that touched them, before grace, setting the plain
tables.
2
In America there are many sacred places: improbable shrines,
Jerusalems of bed sheets,
dim synagogues where the spirit loiters, or sleeps, obsolescent
as that brakeman
I saw long ago on the L & N, waving his handkerchief from a
caboose.
And here on my front porch, midnight, in Jefferson's paved
Virginia,
all the good students are smoking dope and talking about God.
I watch them hesitate and plunge into history. They pass
the joint and I hear, in each voice, the blurred, icy dithyrambs
of Morpheus.
In each face I watch the moon that rises out of childhood,
largest light
against these small heavens resonating through
the wishful dark.
Here are our cosmic rose, our jockey of telepathy, our shaman
of the dime-store mantra.
The joint shrinks, passing from one to another, O orbital
communion.
When the spirit moves you, don't be ascared, spake!
Summer revival, 1958, Church of God,
I was watching, Mrs. Morgan
was coming up like something partially
digested,
Mrs. Morgan was home from the nuthouse and she was
coming
out of her pew like hot shrapnel of bad corn blasting the
throat:
O Savior ... hare me, Lord!
I have in me the creak of the wheelchair
after the unsuccessful
laying on of hands,
the horror and beauty of it. I have belief rotting and going
bad in the stomach, old egg taste that comes to me like
postcards
from places I'd rather forget. On the porch at midnight
the students
will grow silent. They will listen for the wind, the sweet
summer evening,
a few stars diminishing slowly, darkening like the notes of a
lullaby.
Once everyone was a Hemingway at the party where the girl
who painted penises stepped out of her clothes. Her pathetic
gosling neck of a body
clovered with goose bumps, and Christ! the luminous bad taste
of her art. I mean
banana penises rising from baskets of assorted fruits,
wienerwurst penises curled
in Dutch ovens, senile penises slumped in waterlogged dories,
symbolic dorks and phalluses
of men we knew. I mean the night she painted
her whole body purple
and crawled into a party
dragging two bowling balls, bobbing a prick-head of papier-mâché.
Now she teaches at the Y,
drives back and forth from the suburbs in the old
station wagon.
I love her, but it is not the same between us, her thighs
like ponds silting
from underneath and glazing over, blue-green with varicose
algae.
O aging mermaid of the suburbs, I shall teach you Prufrock
in Continuing Ed,
and I promise not to embarrass you, to touch you lightly
as the monarch comes to the leaf of the black locust
or the wand of the Channel 4 weatherman touches a distant
storm.
These nights I think you sleep as the wilderness sleeps beyond
your windows,
anaesthetized,
while the city's nimbus dilates, strewing light
by the ruined creeks.
See how the stag
deer leaps and hesitates and is frozen in the headlights,
the muskrat tunnels into a covert,
the rabbit works a pink sock into her nest of lespedeza and
sedge.
No wonder the undertaker plays the harmonica! No wonder
there are psychiatrists everywhere ashamed of their singing!
No wonder it is always Wednesday.
4
Old hands crusted over with eczema, otherworldly, cold
and blunt as potatoes
on the back of the pew Wednesday nights, where we would go
to pray,
and all the widows were hungry for God, like debutantes
at the end of a boyless summer,
or nun-poets of the Dark Ages singing the sensual body of the
church.
My grandmother, Mrs. Lyle, Mrs. Patterson, Viola Wilkins,
Mavis Kent,
and a few others who could still pray, weep, and sing
unabashedly,
each went down. Each languished in Bobby Summerford's
rest home
in the perversity
of extravagant leisure—game hour, story hour.
Near their deaths
not one of them believed
any man had walked on the moon. I am not concerned that
they rot
sealed away from us, distant as the death of grocery chickens.
On the news there is a fly-bait hand extending
from the rubble.
I know, a man's hand,
hand of a believer in Allah. Some nights I dream that I am
lost,
wandering among numberless houses, dangling like a root in a
sewer.
One of my hands is rotting; I keep it in my shirt like
Napoleon's hand.
This is that season, decadence in the leaf we look at. We sing
for the safe eggs,
sing with the iced fish in the Piggly Wiggly, the worms, the
pale grass,
and the moon seems, yes, to sing, and the water si
ngs in the
spigot.
The old furniture sings mildew and mold, and I am happy
with my friends who remember a few jokes and are serious
at other times,
and with my friends who are at once joking and serious,
and with the most serious jokes, the music of Mozart and
Brahms.
5
I think of the mayfly, who in adulthood forms perfect genitalia
but no stomach,
who lives for a single day to fly up and lay her eggs in the
branches
From Transparent Gestures (1989)
TRANSPARENT GESTURES
There is in the human voice
A quavery vowel sometimes,
More animal than meaning,
More mineral than gentle,
A slight nuance by which my
Mother would recognize lies,
Detect scorn or envy, sober
Things words would not admit,
Though it's true the best liars
Must never know they lie.
They move among goodbyes
Worded like congratulations
We listen for and hear until
Some misery draws us back
To what it really was they
Obviously meant not to say.
And misery often draws us
Out to meadows or trees,
That speechless life where
Everything inhuman is true.
Mother spoke for tentative
People, illiterate, unsure.
To think of it her way is to
Reduce all words to tones
The wind might make anytime
With a few dead leaves. Our
Own names called in the dark
Or quail rising. Sounds that
Go straight from the ear to
The heart. There all the time,
They are a surface too clear
To see. Written down, no
Matter how right, they are too
Slow and vain as those soft
Vows we spoke in childhood to
Wild things, birds or rabbits
We meant to charm. When
Mother mentioned oaks,
They could be cut down, sawn
Into boards and nailed together