As rooms, and she was mostly
Quiet, standing in the kitchen,
Her pin rolling like law
Across plains of biscuit dough
While dark ripened, wind
Died on the tongue of each leaf.
The night broke in pieces
If she cleared her throat.
ONE OF THE CITIZENS
What we have here is a mechanic who reads Nietzsche,
who talks of the English and the French Romantics
as he grinds the pistons; who takes apart the Christians
as he plunges the tarred sprockets and gummy bolts
into the mineral spirits that have numbed his fingers;
an existentialist who dropped out of school to enlist,
who lied and said he was eighteen, who gorged himself
all afternoon with cheese and bologna to make the weight
and guarded a Korean hill before he roofed houses,
first in East Texas, then here in North Alabama. Now
his work is logic and the sure memory of disassembly.
As he dismantles the engine, he will point out damage
and use, the bent nuts, the worn shims of uneasy agreement
He will show you the scar behind each ear where they
put in the plates. He will tap his head like a kettle
where the shrapnel hit, and now history leaks from him,
the slow guile of diplomacy and the gold war makes,
betrayal at Yalta and the barbed wall circling Berlin.
As he sharpens the blades, he will whisper of Ruby and Ray.
As he adjusts the carburetors, he will tell you
of finer carburetors, invented in Omaha, killed by Detroit,
of deals that fall like dice in the world's casinos,
and of the commission in New York that runs everything.
Despiser of miracles, of engineers, he is as drawn
by conspiracies as his wife by the gossip of princesses,
and he longs for the definitive payola of the ultimate fix.
He will not mention the fiddle, though he played it once
in a room where farmers spun and curses were flung,
or the shelter he gouged in the clay under the kitchen.
He is the one who married early, who marshaled a crew
of cranky half-criminal boys through the incompletions,
digging ditches, setting forms for culverts and spillways
for miles along the right-of-way of the interstate;
who moved from construction to Goodyear Rubber
when the roads were finished; who quit each job because
he could not bear the bosses after he had read Kafka;
who, in his mid-forties, gave up on Sartre and Camus
and set up shop in this Quonset hut behind the welder,
repairing what comes to him, rebuilding the small engines
of lawnmowers and outboards. And what he likes best
is to break it all down, to spread it out around him
like a picnic, and to find not just what's wrong
but what's wrong and interesting—some absurd vanity,
or work, that is its own meaning—so when it's together
again and he's fired it with an easy pull of the cord,
he will almost hear himself speaking, as the steel
clicks in the single cylinder, in a language almost
like German, clean and merciless, beyond good and evil.
THE SADNESS OF EARLY AFTERNOONS
Maybe the Sheikh gets to toss his oil wells in the dice,
But here in the living room it's wan more than warm,
After coffee and sweet rolls, when the vacuum groans
Ahead of her like a troll, and life is longer than she
Thought in high school, and time is the critical dust
That floats above the stereo before the kids return.
She buffs her nails or plucks from her domestic well
A flaccid cup of Metrecal, and irons while the TV unfolds
An evolving plot that is less like a line than a tree,
With each pictured life stretching its fabulous branch:
Blackmail, divorce, passion in caves, prisons, gazebos,
Dead-ending into the pink bud of each commercial. Soaps
Are all like this, playing out the reel of eventualities,
Each unlikely trope securing fate in the continuing
Episode. The girl who scoured sinks and polished crystal
In the Emersons' kitchen had money. She slowly sank in.
But when it comes, the answers only pose more questions.
Will the chauffeur be sent back to Poland? What object,
Yet unseen, spread that mortifying shock on Erica's face?
Was it Chad or Josh?—these names that call to the unborn.
And there are'séances where poverty speaks to good fortune.
There are so many deep gazes, cryptic sighs, and far away
The new actress muttering into the mystery of the telephone;
So many doctors in trouble for something that is not quite
Clear, some miswielded scalpel or drunken ambiguous procedure...
The past is everything, though for now, all that may be seen
Is a soliloquy, the particulars of which will not be fully
Comprehended until next week, when Lance returns from Salvador,
Making Jessica erotically glad, but throwing the whole gilded
Household of the Kenwoods, those sourpuss Episcopalians,
A curve of destitution, and then the scene changes: a blond
Girl we do not know yet is struggling up a seaside hill.
The sense is incomplete, though we can guess why Ashley,
Our helpless and innocent Rapunzel, is pawning the rubies.
And it is like life, where the leading cause of infidelity
Is amnesia, with every plot carried out and entered into
The rec room of the veterans' hospital, into the contiguous
Gravy of days that are plotless for the unemployed,
The unemployable, when the last food stamps have been
Thrown into the ante in the impossible bluff on a straight,
And the ace of obsessions has gone unplayed—except here
On the box. It is not that we do not know what will happen,
But how will it happen? What unforeseeable kink
Will draw the dead back up into the camera's glyptic eye?
And who will tell Gerard, caught in that far set: that
Child, the one you thought was yours, was never yours,
And you yourself are not who you think you are. Already
Tomorrow's table is being set for another guest, some hot
Latin fluff or venerable tabloid star to be written in
As you are written off. And this is what has been held back:
The prognosis, the story beneath that new bandage and lump,
Is like the exegesis you were always too ready to accept,
Not understanding what we ... if only we, out here, could come
Into the story and tell you ... that night you were run down
And lay unconscious, the doctor who operated was not drunk,
But bought off by Kirsten, your own wife, who conspired
With your unknown brother, the Sheikh. And that procedure
That would reverse everything, bring you roaring out of
The wheelchair, has been discovered already, but will be
Used against you in the end, perhaps because our desire
Is that you join us here in the suburbs and the projects,
In Peoria and Schenectady. In the vast harem boredom keeps,
We are offering you the sinlessness of our own unlived lives.
ON THE BEARING OF WAITRESSES
Always I thought they suffered, the way they huffe
d
through the Benzedrine light of waffle houses,
hustling trays of omelets, gossiping by the grill,
or pruning passes like the too prodigal buds of roses,
and I imagined each come home to a trailer court,
the yard of bricked-in violets, the younger sister
pregnant and petulant at her manicure, the mother
with her white Bible, the father sullen in his corner.
Wasn't that the code they telegraphed in smirks?
And wasn't this disgrace, to be public and obliged,
observed like germs or despots about to be debunked?
Unlikely brides, aposdes in the gospel of stereotypes,
their future was out there beyond the parked trucks,
between the beer joints and the sexless church,
the images we'd learned from hayseed troubadours—
perfume, grease, and the rending of polarizing loves.
But here in the men's place, they preserved a faint
decorum of women and, when they had shuffled past us,
settled in that realm where the brain approximates
names and rounds off the figures under uniforms.
Not to be honored or despised, but to walk as spies would,
with almost alien poise in the imperium of our disregard,
to go on steadily, even on the night of the miscarriage,
to glide, quick smile, at the periphery of appetite.
And always I had seen them listening, as time brought
and sent them, hovering and pivoting as the late
orders turned strange, blue garden, brown wave. Spit
in the salad, wet socks wrung into soup, and this happened.
One Sunday morning in a truckstop in Bristol, Virginia,
a rouged and pancaked half-Filipino waitress
with hair dyed the color of puffed wheat and mulberries
singled me out of the crowd of would-be bikers
and drunken husbands guzzling coffee to sober up
in time to cart their disgusted wives and children
down the long street to the First Methodist Church.
Because I had a face she trusted, she had me wait
that last tatter of unlawful night that hung there
and hung there like some cast-off underthing
caught on the spikes of a cemetery's wrought-iron fence.
And what I had waited for was no charm of flesh,
not the hard seasoning of luck, or work, or desire,
but all morning, in the sericea by the filthy city lake,
I suffered her frightened he, how she was wanted
in Washington by the CIA, in Vegas by the FBI—
while time shook us like locks that would not break.
And I did not speak, though she kept pausing to look
back across one shoulder, as though she were needed
in the trees, but waxing her slow paragraphs into
chapters, filling the air with her glamour and her shame.
THE KITCHEN GODS
Carnage in the lot: blood freckled the chopping block—
The hen's death is timeless, frantic.
Its numbskull lopped, one wing still drags
The pointless circle of a broken clock,
But the vein fades in my grandmother's arm on the ax.
The old ways fade and do not come back
The sealed aspirin does not remember the willow.
The supermarket does not remember the barnyard.
The hounds of memory come leaping and yapping.
One morning is too large to fit inside the mouth.
My grandmother's life was a long time
Toiling between Blake's root-and-lightning
Yahweh and the girlish Renaissance Christ
That plugged the flue in her kitchen wall.
Early her match flamed across the carcass.
Her hand, fresh from the piano, plunged
The void bowel and set the breadcrumb heart.
The stove's eye reddened. The day's great spirit rose
From pies and casseroles. That was the house—
Reroofed, retiled, modernized, and rented out,
It will not glide up and lock among the stars.
The tenants will not find the pantry fully stocked
Or the brass boat where she kept the matches dry.
I find her stone and rue our last useless
Divisive arguments over the divinity of Christ.
Only where the religion goes on without a god
And the sandwich is wolfed down without a blessing,
I think of us bowing at the table there:
The grand patriarch of the family holding forth
In staunch prayer, and the potato pie I worshiped.
The sweeter the pie, the shorter the prayer.
MULE
Here is this horse from a bad family/hating his burden and snaffle,
not patient
So much as resigned to his towpath around the sorghum mill, but
pawing the grist,
Laying back his missile ears to balk, so the single spoke of his wheel
freezes, the gears lock.
Not sad, but stubborn, his temperament is tolerance, though his voice,
Old door aching on a rusty hinge, blasts the martins from their
gourds, and he would let
Nothing go behind him: the speckled hen, the green world his
blinders magnify.
With the heel of one ecclesiastical hoof, he would stun goats or gods.
Half-ass, garrulous priest, his religion's a hybrid appetite that feasts
on contradictions.
In him Jefferson dreamed the end of slavery and endless fields, but
the labor goes on
In prefabricated barns, by stalled regiments of canopied tractors,
in offices
Where the harvest is computed to the least decimal point, to the last
brown bowl of wheat.
Not with him, the soil yields and futures swell into the radio.
His place, finally, is to be loved as a curiosity, as an art almost dead,
like this sulfurous creek
Of molasses he brings oozing down from the bundles of cane.
Sometimes in the library I pause suddenly and think of the mule,
desiring, perhaps, some lost sweetness,
Some fitful husk or buttercup that blooms wildly beyond the margins.
Such a peace comes over the even rows, the bound volumes where
the unicorn
Bows his unearthly head, where the horned gods of fecundity rear in
the pages of the sun.
All afternoon I will think of the mule's dignity, of his shrunken lot—
While the statistics slip the tattered net of my attention,
While the lullabies erect their precise nests in the footnotes.
I like to think of the silver one of my childhood and the dark red
one, Red.
Avuncular, puritanical, he stands on hooves as blue as quarries,
And I think his is the bray I have held back all of my life, in churches
Where the offering passed discreetly from one laborer to the next, in
the factories of sleep,
Plunging a greased hand into the vat of mineral spirits.
And I think I have understood nothing better than the mule's cruelty
and petty meanness:
How, subjugated, he will honk his incomparable impudence; stop for
no reason;
Or, pastured with inferiors, stomp a newborn calf on a whim.
This is the mule's privilege: not to be governed badly by lashes, nor to
be turned
Easily by praise; but, sovereign of his own spirit, to take his own time,
To meditate in the hardening compost under the rotting collars.
To sleep in wet straw. To stand for nothing
but himself.
In August he will stand up to his withers in the reeking pond. In the
paradise of mules
He will stand with the old cows, contemplative, but brooding a little
over the sores in his shoulders,
Remembering the dull shoes of the cultivator and the jet heads of the
mowing machine.
Being impotent and beautiful, he will dream of his useless romances.
THE FOOLISHNESS
After his last brindled half-Guernsey had been sold off,
after the third accident in two months, when we hid
the keys and jerked the starter from the blue Dodge,
and long after the first heart attack in the hayfield,
without mentioning it to anyone, my grandfather began
collecting plastic milk jugs and storing them in his barn,
stuffing the gunnysacks, laying whiteness down the aisle
where the halters hung like dim frames of photographs
and the hens' speckled scat whirled in cotillions of dust.
Before that he'd kept an archive of superannuated tools,
severed belts, odd linkages, screws with stripped threads,
as though, given time, the swaddling crud would unwind
from the brittle gears, the transmission frozen in reverse
would bolt the tractor forward through the unturned fields.
Or these jugs would hold other than what they'd held:
honeyed things of the spirit, bleached Saharas of wheat,
water to stanch fire, or ballast to float us past the flood.
Not that he ever slowed for fear, nor did he often
pause, cankering into dream. His wisdom was classical
and practical: to drive staples cross-grain to hold
the wire, to keep cows with small heads for easy birthing.
Sisyphus of farms, he knew the husk that transcends use
and teetered in a snaggle of plows where the spiders
were tracking rust onto the seat of the cultivator
from the upward-turning teeth of the harrow. Ahead,
morning tore at the fresh webs, the ghosts of picksacks
swayed in the crooked balance of the broken scale,
and before dawn roused the engines, he would come in secret,
with more absence than he could possibly have drunk,
bringing up from the dump, like a boy's stolen melons