of the charity ward
And watched the red-haired intern cover the dead indigent with a
sheet and suffered
His lecture on the epistemological and literary virtues of Ayn Rand;
that the night
I lugged her through the foggy streets and left her with the Jesuit
priest still has some truck with me
When I strap my son into the car or push him past the gleaming
lawns; that it stands with the nights
Of mescaline, the nights of abortions, and the nights of betrayals;
nothing will shake it
From the totem of my forty-second year, even if I arrive at clarity, with
some bitter water for the lilies,
With some sweet nitrogen for the willows, for that was the privilege,
to carry the light itself
And not burn down, not yet, and I will not turn Judas to the madness.
APOCALYPTIC NARRATIVE
1
Clearing the boxes, tins of stale biscuits, powdered eggs
And milk, dried soybeans, we found our last provisions
Whole except for syringes and numbing drugs
Imaginative junkies had stripped from the medical kits.
The water was still pure in each forty-gallon jug,
The U.S. government cheese barely rinded with mold.
Two weeks' rations for ten thousand, the foreman said.
One man hummed. Another told a joke of diddling
A woman so fat he didn't know if it was out or in,
Though none brooked the hotter subject underneath:
The exponential x-ray that would blast all buildings,
Bridges, and trees, or the fine ash, fallen in dreams,
The fever and vomiting, the putrefaction of the skin—
That blind nightmare we fattened for forty years.
It ran with hell. It ended. It was not the world
We took on wobbling dollies, up the steep ledge
Under the bat-fouled bluff, and dumped in the truck,
But strangely disappointing, then, to see the cave
Emptied to darkness and know, too, the whole place
Would go to spiders, the entrance be boarded up,
Though, later, a local dentist established there
A five nativity so popular the church put bleachers up,
And once the fundamentalist governor came and stood
Before us playing a simple shepherd with a crook,
Commemorating hope. The mountain overhead, five
Hundred million tons of limestone, was not enough.
2
Too much of the trappings of our imagined ends
Depends on the hoax and rot of lapsed mythologies,
Horned broodstock of the dreamlife, ghosts
Of some earlier holiness, wisdomed up from warnings
And grafted onto laws already weighted down
With ancient torts, preferments, property rights—
But the dream believes most what logic denies:
Those crusty gods, those fires that gut the heart.
When I was a boy in Alabama, I loved my mother's
Biscuits, March rain pelleting on the tin roof,
My crippled, one-eyed dog; but feared the dark,
The snaky pond, the neighbor kid who'd come
On stormy nights and hunker just beyond the porch
Chronicling missiles and megatons, the joy
In his voice as he whispered, Vaporized, vaporized,
And more than him, the six-foot-six evangelist,
Last night of the revival, Bible wriggling high
On one blue palm as he rhapsodized on Armageddon.
I thought, Christ eats the dead. And think now
How the planet would turn as well without us,
As when a finger is lifted from a glass
And the water regains its shape, or sometimes,
Of a sudden, one night of childhood will clear
Above the general mist: a rock, a teardrop cedar—
We stand there linking hands before the fire,
Sing low, demand to hear the ghost story again,
Complain incessantly it is too mild unless
Blood drips from the banister and the headless
Woman shrieks and writhes up out of the fire.
We are not thrilled unless we are terrified.
3
Only in the tamed trembling of a poem, I had believed
Some kindness might survive, and "Cool your jets,"
He told me when I chided him for barging in late
And slamming down his books as I gravely read
Gray's "Elegy," a thing I shouldn't remember
Except it had a point. "Hey man, cool your jets!"
One of the teenage wisdoms: Beauty is final,
Devastating, absolute. In ugliness there is hope,
In trashed rivers, in the slightly obese girl
Who sat beside me twenty-five years ago as the bus
Groaned toward evil Tuscaloosa. And so I came
Like Amos to the black-light, pop-poster salons,
Read Vonnegut, heard the Dead, dropped mescaline
In numb, freaked-out America that year of Tet,
Said, "I won't go. I won't kiss the ass of death"—
But lacked the ossifying cool, the Stratocaster,
Ponytail, and rap that arched the backs of girls,
And so dug the French thing from Michaud to Villon
And languished in the rigor mortis of the I Ching.
And when Frog McEntire, God's aboriginal hippie, dressed me
For the drag ball—black midi and cultured pearls,
Matching bag, a platinum wig from the Dollar Store—
And squired me across the yard, a skeleton
Stooped and shat in a can. Four bikers roared
Up on hogs. He said, "Man, it's happening, and
I can't fucking believe it." He said, "Too much."
A bamboo screen, white kitchen, Jim-Ella's crowd
Raising blond dollops of hash on glowing spoons,
Gay, petulant, bouffant as Medusa's beauty shop—
And down the candled hall, black-jacketed Warhol,
Albino and amphetamined, beside his latest star.
4
This is the world sex saved us from: not fame
But indifference, not the moment of adulation
But the crowd dispersing through the alleys
Near the stadium, one season with its star
Dimming in empathetic roles, the nurse,
The guidance counselor, the sage of Mini-Pads,
Ascending the channels, eternities of Prague and Omaha.
In Carbondale, it comes in snowy, cracked, oblique.
"It's something in the water," a woman told me,
But the party soaked its last liqueurs. Jokes sobered.
A physicist spoke of a new calendar he'd devised,
Beginning after television, after the bomb. "We are,"
He said, "so terribly junior to that God."
When I was a boy, I loved my mother's biscuits
And feared the dark; deep space; vengeance
Of the desert prophets driving their vision dogs
Until the sexual animal was treed in fire.
"It's better," she said, pulling on lace panties
Behind the church, "when you believe in hell."
But it does no good to rub the times together,
Gabbling on that old string because we are strangers
In the peace that intervenes between lovemakings.
Or to see it all in an erupting instant given out
As when the artsies stroll all in black they know
It will fly apart, glass city, omnipotent, vulnerable.
And "God is orgasm," she whispered years ago
And lay back, small and white, on the dark rug.
It is not enough. It bores us an
d it works
As an ending only once unless we come to it without will,
And we come, stupid and crazy, believing in love,
And go winding back down the temple's easy stairs,
Near sleep, plummet past the owl and the mole,
And Twain wrote of ringworm as divine intervention.
5
After a while it occurs to us and at the simplest times
When the lights go suddenly out and we fumble
Lampward through the deep clutter of the rooms,
The past is mainly dark, but not what we thought,
Squirreled away in a box, all its books shut,
Its songs and anecdotes, previews of oblivion.
It will happen again, the terrifying sex, the light
Flesh makes blazing quietly underground,
Hendrix and Joplin, Morrison and Allman;
Talmadge, my childhood friend, Patrick's lover,
Who sang beautifully "How Great Thou Art"
And stewarded on the Chicago-London route
Before expiring, according to the local daily,
"From ambiguous complications of pneumonia";
Silly flowers on the ridge at Grayson Highlands,
Foxglove and wood sorrel, blueprints of mania
Where we sat and heard the charismatics testify:
And when God called me to his service, I got
My hammer and saw, put the ladder in the truck,
And drove to Mexico. And built His holy church.
Fog was lifting. Earlier rain had passed
East, whirled up the Holston watershed,
And now, as the light of the world came skipping
And dappling vague rosettes among the stones,
A man rose from the lee of the highest boulder
And spoke: Brothers and sisters, strength
Is not enough. I ate steroids like candy,
Bulked up and benched five hundred pounds,
But it was emptiness until I accepted grace
And gave it up. The money, the cars, the girls.
And now, pump iron for Him, praise His name—
Listen, only a thin layer of skin
Keeps us from squirting into the world.
6
This is the last testimony of the last days, made
On Sunday as cars rattle over the iron bridge
And on down Chautauqua, a stone and glass chapel
Founded on tax shelters, a modest Episcopalian miracle.
Light of the world, this is the joke love makes.
I was saved in Alabama and backslid to some good
Loving early in the colicky infancy of the bomb.
I hope my son won't run with zombies to the end.
The deal I'd rather make with the dead is fun,
The victories of peace: clean pillows, luxuries
Of orange juice and toast, which need no blessing,
Because the god sleeps, and nothing worships us.
No prophet rivets us to dread. No demon comes
On the tails of black jets, only iced tea and soup,
The Cowboys and the Bears, the endless human hope
That, backed up to the goal, insists that this
Is all there will be. This is all there will ever be;
But if you should read this, far off in the future,
Small and indefatigable dots, still holding on,
Still balancing on a blind tentacle of science,
Praise us that once we lay down without prevention
And started it, whatever it is salted in the genes,
Recessive trump that, of its own passiveness, waits
Through the unplayable hand and survives exactness.
Praise our uplifted thighs and the cries we made
As the seed harvest bared the singing nerve. Praise
Our electrons humming down cables from the split atom.
Praise the Beatles, W. C. Fields, and Bessie Smith.
Praise our many knowledges that came from accidents.
From our six fingers come your corrugating fins.
From our eyes come the balls of your reticulate feet.
From our brains your batteries. From our livers
Your encyclotropic perfumes. And if it is genesis
You would study, imagine us. We lived here.
We made our choice between the virus and the germ.
From Things That Happen Once (1996)
TV
All the preachers claimed it was Satan.
Now the first sets seem more venerable
Than Abraham or Williamsburg
Or the avant-garde. Back then nothing,
Not even the bomb, had ever looked so new.
It seemed almost heretical watching it
When we visited relatives in the city,
Secretly delighting, but saying later,
After church, probably it would not last,
It would destroy things: standards
And the sacredness of words in books.
It was well into the age of color,
Korea and Little Rock long past,
Before anyone got one. Suddenly some
Of them in the next valley had one.
You would know them by their lights
Burning late at night, and the recentness
And distance of events entering their talk,
But not one in our valley; for a long time
No one had one, so when the first one
Arrived in the van from the furniture store
And the men had set the box on the lawn,
At first we stood back from it, circling it
As they raised its antenna and staked in
The guy wires before taking it in the door,
And I seem to recall a kind of blue light
Flickering from inside and then a woman
Calling out that they had got it tuned in—
That would stay with us, the way we hurried
Down the dirt road, the stars, the silence,
Then everyone disappearing into the houses.
MORTAL SORROWS
The tortxures of lumbago consumed Aunt Madge,
And Leah Vest, once resigned from schoolmarming,
Could not be persuaded to leave the house.
Mrs. Mary Hogan, after birthing her fifth son,
Lay bedfast for the last fifty-two years of her life,
Reporting shooting pains that would begin
High in her back and shear downward to her feet,
As though, she said, she had been glazed in lightning;
Also men, broken on bridges and mills,
Shell-shocked veterans, religious alcoholics—
Leldon Kilpatrick, Johnson Suggs, Whitey Carlyle:
They came and sat there too, leafing through
Yellowing Pageants and Progressive Farmers;
One by one, all entered in and talked,
While the good doctor gargled a dark chaff
In his pipe and took down symptoms,
Annotating them on his hidden chart—
Numbness, neuralgia, the knotted lymph,
The clammy palms—and then he'd scratch
His temple's meaningful patch of white
And scrawl out his unfailing barbiturate prescription
To be filled by his pharmacist brother-in-law
Until half the county had gathered as in a lap,
The quantum ache, the mutiny in every house.
How much pain, how many diseases
Consigned to the mythological, the dropped
Ovaries, the torn-up nerves, what women
Said, what men wanted to believe? Part of it
Laughable, I know. Still I want someone
To see, now that they lie safe in graves
Beyond the vacant stores, that someone
Listened and, hearing the wrong at the heart,
Named it s
omething that sounded real, whatever
They lived through and died of. I remember
Mrs. Lyle, who called it a thorn in the flesh,
And Mr.Appleton, who had no roof in his mouth.
BEAUTIFUL CHILD
Because I looked out as I was looked upon
(Blue-eyed under the golden corm of ringlets
That my mother could not bring herself
To have the barber shear from my head),
I began to sense, as adults approached me,
That hunger a young woman must feel
When a lover seizes one breast too long
On the ideal nipple-balm of the tongue.
When they lifted me and launched me
Ceilingward, I seemed to hang there years,
A satellite in the orbit of their affections,
Spinning near the rainspot continents
And the light globe freckled with flies.
I could smell the week-old syrupy sweat
And the kerosene of many colognes.
I could see the veined eyes and the teeth
Dotted with shreds of lettuce and meat.
When I touched down, one of them
Would hold me to the torch of a beard
And goose my underarms until I screamed.
Another would rescue me, but leave
On my cheek the heart-mark of her kiss.
So I began, at three, to push them away.
There was no ceremony and few words,
But, like a woman who has let a man go too far
And, in one night's moodiness, steps
Out of a parked car and walks home alone,
I came suddenly to my life. They
Did not begrudge me, but turned back
To the things they had done before,
The squeaking bed, the voices late at night.
Mornings I'd crawl beneath the house,
Dreaming how poignantly tragic my death
Would seem, but, having thought about it,
I happily took myself into the darkness
Of the underground, where I was king.